From the Princeton Weekly Bulletin, April 28, 1997

NSF funds summer research
program for undergraduates

The National Science Foundation has awarded a team of professors in electrical engineering $600,000 to fund the Princeton Summer Institute, a 10-week program that will give 15 to 20 undergraduates from all over the country first-hand experience in research at the frontiers of electrical engineering.

Students in the institute will work with members of the electrical engineering faculty and their research groups on advanced research topics, while also participating in several optional, interdisciplinary, handson short courses.

"Since undergraduates often do not know the various fields within a discipline, we felt it important to give them 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 coprincipal investigator of the institute.

Components of the institute areresearch 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 lab projects that introduce semiconductor technology and signal processing as applied to either communications or image processing; and biweekly talks and discussions on ethics and the role of technology in society as a whole.

Candidates for the 1997 institute must be U.S. citizens or students in a U.S. institution. They must have completed their junior year and be majoring in electrical engineering or a related discipline, such as computer science, physics or materials science. Participants will receive a weekly salary and travel allowance, as well as housing in campus dorms.

For more information about the program and application procedures, write to PSI, Department of Electrical Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544 or access http:// www.ee.princeton.edu/psi/psi.html.