ECE NEWS
MERIT Summer Fair Showcases Undergraduate Research
August 11, 2006
View MERIT Photo Album
Industry, government, and University representatives were on hand for the Maryland Engineering Research Internship Teams (MERIT) Annual Fair at the Stamp Student Union Grand  Ballroom on Friday, August 11.
MERIT is a unique, 11-week summer research program that offers top undergraduate engineering students from around the country the opportunity to engage in cutting-edge, team-based, cross-disciplinary research projects at the University of Maryland. The summer program culminates in the MERIT Fair, a half-day program that provides student teams a chance to showcase their work to a wider audience, and to be judged on the quality of their research efforts. Student projects were scrutinized by a panel of judges selected from academia, industry, and government laboratories.
In the MICRA (microelectronics research) program, Daniel Chang (pictured above, right) from Princeton University won the best project award for his research titled "Electron Beam Induced Deposition of Platinum Contacts." Daniel worked with ECE Professor John Melngailis, Dr. Matthew Ervin, Dr. Barbara Nichols and Dr. Alma Wickenden from the Army Research Lab, and John Barry, an engineer with the University of Maryland's Institute for Research in Electronics & Applied Physics (IREAP) .
In the RITE (telecommunications) program, two teams shared first place.
Konstantin Khrustov from the University of Illinois at Chicago and Saket Vora from North Carolina State University (pictured at left) won best project award for their research titled "High Powered Widebank Microwave Interference on Switching Power Supplies." They worked under Professor John Rodgers and Professor Victor Granatstein and graduate student Todd Firestone.
Sharing first place honors were Eric Chen and Harneet Khurana from the University of Maryland (pictured below) who worked under Dr. Pamela Abshire and graduate students Nicole Nelson, Alfred Haas, Marc Dandin and Somashekar Prakash. Their project was titled "Bio Labs-on-a-Chip: Monitoring Cells Using CMOS Biosensors."
 This year, 23 students participated in the MERIT program. In addition to University of Maryland students, MERIT participants included students from Columbia University, Cornell University, Princeton University, University of Illinois at Chicago, Brigham Young University, the Citadel, Frank W. Olin College, North Carolina State University, University of the District of Columbia, University of Portland, and Virginia Commonwealth University.
For more information about the MERIT program, please visit www.ece.umd.edu/MERIT.
For more information, contact Director of Public Relations Ted Knight at 301-405-3596, or teknight@umd.edu.
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