Here is the description of your REMOTE summer research project. The typical project should be 20 hours per week and 10 weeks of work and paired with a graduate student mentor. Students will formally start the research on June 1 and work through August 7. Students will participate in a remote/online professional development program organized by SURF and project outcomes will be disseminated in an online symposium on July 30.

Environmental Science, Material Science and Engineering, Nanotechnology, Other

Materials Engineering, Chemical Engineering

MSE

John Howarter

Agricultural and Biological Engineering Department has contributed several tools for environmental modeling community. It is a challenge to review and understand old codes with minimum documentation. This project involves modernizing an environmental modeling software written primarily in Perl. In this project, the SURF student will first assess the current application, create a plan for the new iteration in collaboration with the project supervisor, get a head start on developing the new application and document the process. The SURF student will work with a staff programmer.

Agricultural, Computer Engineering and Computer Science, Environmental Science, Other

Agricultural Engineering , Civil Engineering, Computer Science or related disciplines

Programming skills in any language with some experience in frontend and backend web development is desired.

Agricultural and Biological Engineering

Dharmendra Saraswat

Forests provide a wide array of goods and services on which humans depend for their well-being in both urban and rural locations. Unfortunately, land clearing for both urbanization and agriculture have fragmented much of the world's forests with unknown consequences for their ability to continue providing these services. Trees that are located on the edge of a forest are exposed to a different suite of environmental factors than trees on the inside of a forest. Edge trees are impacted by environmental factors such as higher exposure to light, wind, and temperature gradients. Other factors include effects from neighboring land depending on type and use. The purpose of this project is to quantify differences in the edge effect on trees in rural settings compared to urban settings that may lead to different levels of ecosystem functioning that have previously been unaccounted for.

Agricultural, Environmental Science, Other

EEE/FNR

Experience conducting field research in forest ecosystems Successfully completed at least 1 GIS course

FNR/EEE

Brady Hardiman

The continued miniaturization of electronic devices, with expanded functionality at reduced cost, challenges the viability of products across a broad spectrum of industry applications. The electronics industry is driven by global trends in storage, transmission, and processing of extreme quantities of digital information (cloud computing, data centers), increasing electrification of the transportation sector (electric vehicles, hybrid aircraft, batteries), and the proliferation of interconnected computing devices (mobile computing, IoT, 5G). Proper thermal management of electronic devices is critical to avoid overheating failures and ensure energy efficient operation. In view of these rapidly evolving markets, most of the known electronics cooling technologies are approaching their limits and have a direct impact on system performance (e.g., computing power, driving range, device size, etc.).

Research projects in the Cooling Technologies Research Center (CTRC) are exploring new technologies and discovering ways to more effectively apply existing technologies to addresses the needs of companies and organizations in the area of high-performance heat removal from compact spaces. One of the distinctive features of working in this Center is training in practical applications relevant to industry. All of the projects involve close industrial support and collaboration in the research, often with direct transfer of the technologies to the participating industry members. Projects in the Center involve both experimental and computational aspects, are multi-disciplinary in nature, and are open to excellent students with various engineering and science backgrounds. Multiple different research project opportunities are available based on student interests and preferences.

Aerospace Engineering, Chemical, Computational/Mathematical, Electronics, Innovative Technology/Design, Material Science and Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Nanotechnology, Other

School of Mechanical Engineering

Justin Weibel

This project aims to quantify historical and ongoing erosion along Lake Michigan's shoreline, using drones and water survey data. With Lake Michigan water levels currently at near-record highs, property damage along the lakeshore is immense, and the student will work to better understand the magnitude and mechanisms of shoreline erosion. This project will involve field work and potentially some computer simulations of Lake Michigan shoreline erosion.

Civil and Construction, Environmental Science, Mechanical Engineering, Other

Civil or Environmental Engineering

The desired student would have experience on the water or in the field, as well as basic abilities in Excel and Matlab. The student must be able to swim and ideally have some experience on boats.

Civil Engineering

Cary Troy

Interested in multiple project areas.

Agricultural, Aerospace Engineering, Bioscience/Biomedical, Chemical, Civil and Construction, Computational/Mathematical, Computer Engineering and Computer Science, Educational Research/Social Science, Electronics, Environmental Science, Industrial Engineering, Innovative Technology/Design, Life Science, Material Science and Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Mechanical Systems, Nanotechnology, Physical Science, Other

Any

Purdue University

John Howarter

This project will develop and conduct an online behavioral game that will crowdsource participants through Amazon Mechanical Turk. In this behavioral experiment, a group of real human subjects can complete a relevant task online (solving a social dilemma in the face of environmental shocks) and communicate their knowledge and experience to a next group of online participants (next generation). Many groups of online participants will be crowdsourced into the experiment to generate high fidelity behavioral data on a mass scale. Participants' decision data will be analyzed to test several hypotheses about human behavior.

Computational/Mathematical, Educational Research/Social Science, Environmental Science, Industrial Engineering, Innovative Technology/Design, Mechanical Engineering, Other

Computer science, industrial engineering, civil engineering, Purdue Polytechnic (computer information & technology), electrical engineering, etc.

Software programming for online/web application (e.g., PhP).

Civil Engineering & Political Science

David Yu