Skip to main content

News & Events

Undergraduate research and capstones shine

Amy Sprague
June 10, 2024

A&A presented impressive undergrad research & capstones at the annual SHARC Week showcase.

A collage featuring individuals in a lightning talks and poster sessions event

Scenes from the 2024 A&A Undergraduate Showcase, hosted by Professor Mehran Mesbahi (left), pictured with the AeroTEC capstone team's flight test vehicle.

A&A celebrated the impressive undergraduate research and capstones at the annual Undergraduate Research Showcase on May 21st as part of SHARC Week. Each capstone team displayed their hardware for the crowd and submitted a video for the viewing of the 2024 Capstone Film Fest. On the research side, ten research posters on a wide variety of topics took the stage as well.

Showcase winners

Four research poster presenters received awards from our Judges Panel and the People’s Choice:

First place and People’s Choice Award: Yeongjun “Marvin” Bok

Designing a Hypersonic Ludwieg Tube for UW

Taking home both the first place and People's Choice awards was Yeongjun "Marvin" Bok for his preliminary design from the Williams Turbulence Lab, featuring a Ludwieg tube configuration for the interchangeable shock tunnel facility to enable future hypersonic testing at Mach 5-10 speeds. His work investigated repurposing existing pipes while optimizing operating conditions, test section sizing, and test section flow properties.

Second place: John Michael Racy

Batoid Dynamics: Bioinspired Structures & Undulatory Propulsion

John Michael Racy of the Illimited Lab explored novel designs for undulatory propulsion inspired by the morphology of batoid (ray) fins. His simplified plate models allow characterization of modal frequencies and shapes using dynamic digital image correlation.  These insights from across the functional diversity of batoid species will inform future bio-inspired propulsion systems.

Third place: Jasper Geldenbott and Annika Singh

Legible and Proactive Robot Planning for Prosocial Human-Robot Interactions

Jasper Geldenbott and Annika Singh presented their research out of the Control & Trustworthy Robotics Lab (CTRL) on a trajectory optimization approach that accounts for human behaviors like proactivity and equitable responsibility during collision avoidance scenarios. Incorporating markup factors incentivizes legible robot motions to convey intent early.

"Our undergraduates consistently produce work of remarkable quality," said Professor Mehran Mesbahi, who hosted the event. "Their innovative thinking and dedication to aerospace research shows the bright future awaiting this next generation."

Congratulations to all participants for an engaging and successful 2024 Undergraduate Showcase. Thank you also to Professor Saenz Otero for all of his work with our capstone teams, to Harry Furey-Soper who emceed the Film Fest portion of the evening, and to our judges: A&A PhD student Ari Athair and our alumni, including A&A board member and CTO and co-founder of Interlune Gary Lai, affiliate professor Francesco Deleo and James Koch from PNNL.

Explore all of our undergraduate research posters