Pervin is entering her sophomore year in Chemical Engineering at Purdue. She has spent the last two summers as a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) participant, working alongside Jillian Vitter in Dr. Les Geddes' laboratory. Jillian is a senior at Notre Dame, and secretary of her SWE chapter.

These two students have been working on measuring the force exerted by both trained CPR rescuers and untrained adults in the administration of CPR. The results were quite surprising. In view of the revised AHA recommendations to depress the chest by 1.5 to 2 inches (which requires 100-125 lbs of pressure), it would appear that trained CPR rescuers do not exert enough force for effective CPR. Therefore, the need for some kind of biofeedback signal to indicate appropriate compressions would lead to an improvement in performance of CPR.

The SURF program was initiated in 2003 using a portion of an unrestricted gift from Purdue University Alum Patrick Wang. Purdue's College of Engineering launched the program to meet the increasing needs of academia and industry by providing a dedicated laboratory experience to strengthen integrated, research-related, hands-on learning through discovery for participating students.