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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Ann Haver-Allen (609) 258-3617
Date: Distributed March 28, 1997
NSF Grant Opens Research Opportunities for Undergraduates
Princeton, N.J.--A team of professors in the Electrical Engineering Department at Princeton University School of Engineering and Applied Sciences was awarded about $600,000 by the National Science Foundation to fund the Princeton Summer Institute--a summer program designed to give undergraduates an opportunity to work on advanced research projects with an internationally renowned faculty.
The on-campus, 10-week program will give undergraduates first-hand experience in doing research at the frontiers of electrical engineering. They will work with members of the electrical engineering faculty and their research groups on advanced research topics, while also participating in several optional, interdisciplinary, hands-on short courses.
"Since undergraduates often do not know the various fields within a discipline, we felt it important to give the participants an exposure to a variety of fields within electrical engineering and demonstrate to them the breadth of activities, even within a single academic discipline," said Stuart Schwartz, professor of electrical engineering and co-principal investigator of the Institute.
Fifteen to 20 undergraduates from all over the country will be accepted for the 1997 program. Eligible candidates for the Institute must have completed their junior year, be a U.S. citizen or be enrolled in a U.S. university, and be majoring in electrical engineering or a related discipline (computer science, physics, materials science, etc.). Students will be housed in campus dormitories. Participants will receive a weekly salary and a travel allowance.
The Institute is intended to provide meaningful undergraduate research experience in the field of electrical engineering with the primary objective of increasing the pool of qualified domestic undergraduates who want to go on to graduate school for advanced degrees in engineering and science, and to help them obtain a better perspective on what research entails. Current research projects in the Department of Electrical Engineering are in the areas of electronic materials and devices, photonics and optoelectronics, computer engineering, communications, and signal and image processing.
The Institute has four major components that will provide students with cutting edge research experience, an overview of electrical engineering and related fields, and an exposure to the larger questions of ethics and the role of technology in society. The components are:
- research experience supervised by a regular faculty member and mentored by a graduate student;
- weekly informal lunch seminars by faculty members giving a review of their research field or discussion of "hot" topics;
- ongoing group laboratory projects giving an introduction to both semiconductor technology and signal processing as applied to either communications or image processing; and
- bi-weekly talks and discussions on ethics and the role of technology in society as a whole.
At the end of the summer program, participants will make an oral presentation to the other undergraduates in the program.
For more information about the Princeton Summer Institute in the Department of Electrical Engineering, including application procedures, write to PSI, Department of Electrical Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, N.J. 08544, or visit the Web site at http:www.ee.princeton.edu/psi/psi.html.