NASA grant keeps undergrads going

Bering Sea excursion

While some of the research grants kept the participating undergraduate students at home working on wiring and computer programs, Jason Graff, an undergraduate in oceanography, and Evelyn Lessard, associate professor of oceanography, spent 24 days on a research vessel collecting samples in the Bering Sea.

They were looking to explain a sudden surge in the population of white-shelled plankton called coccolithophores.

"If you get enough of these guys, thousands per milliliter of these organisms, [the water] actually looks white," said Lessard.

During the same time as the coccolithophore blooms, there was a major die-off of seabirds and fish inhabiting the Bering Sea.

"One of the hypothesis we had was that these new microplankton might have disrupted the trophic system." said Lessard. A trophic system is equivalent to the food chain. The scientists on the research vessel believed that larger plankton weren't eating the coccolithophores, creating a lack of food all the way up the food chain, but they found this wasn't the case.

"Generally speaking, we haven't found [a disruption of the trophic system]. Other things are eating [the coccolithopore]," said Lessard.

Graff encourages other undergraduates to "get involved ... it's not difficult. You learn a lot, and, at least here, it's very flexible to how many hours I put in."

A robot to keep the lights on

The UW electrical engineering department generates over a hundred projects a year, but not all of them involve building a smart robot to detect problem areas in underground power lines.

But this summer, undergraduate Michelle Raymond, assistant professor Alexander Mamishev and a team of electrical engineering researchers started work on an autonomous robot that would crawl along large underground power cables and use sensors to detect any irregularities such as a change in heat or moisture.

The work is still in its preliminary stages. The research team is just starting to build a prototype out of plastic parts; which is a step above their current model, which is made out of Legos.

"The sensors will also detect the property changes in the insulation. From that you can tell if there's moisture being soaked up by the insulation which can cause damage to the cables which actually causes explosions in the transformers," said Raymond.

Over the summer, Raymond worked part-time at the lab and researched a number of different sensors to detect heat.

"[The research] has started me on thinking about graduate school because I've been able to see first hand what the research graduate students are doing," said Raymond.