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SURF and WAVE Students Return to Campus

September 23, 2021

After a year of remote learning because of the COVID-19 pandemic, a group of 318 undergraduates was brought back to campus this summer to participate in the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowships (SURF) and WAVE Fellows programs. Through SURF, Caltech undergraduates can conduct 10-week-long research projects with faculty; WAVE aims to promote the participation of underrepresented students in science and engineering, and allows students from other institutions to do summer research at Caltech. "I had never done any research or worked in a scientific setting before the SURF program," says Caltech sophomore Rahul Chawlani. "I learned not only how research works but also how to manage responsibilities in a workplace and lab."

Click through the slideshow to meet some of the students and learn about their summer projects.

MIT junior Liliana Edmonds delicately moves a magnetic sensor 1 millimeter at a time as part of a WAVE project in collaboration with Azita Emami, Andrew and Peggy Cherng Professor of Electrical Engineering and Medical Engineering and director of the Center for Sensing to Intelligence. She was focused on methods to improve researchers' and clinicians' ability to locate and position trackable microscale devices inside the body. The goal is to improve the effectiveness of precision surgeries and medical procedures.

Credit: Lance Hayashida/Caltech

Caltech sophomore Lian Zhu worked with Mikhail Shapiro, professor of chemical engineering, on a SURF project aimed at improving the diagnosis of inflammatory bowel diseases and pinpointing sites of inflammation. She engineered E. coli bacteria to express certain protein nanostructures that the researchers can image in the lab.

Credit: Lance Hayashida/Caltech

In her SURF, Caltech junior Diana Frias Franco (left) designed and built an instrument to measure the torque exerted on a sample of smart fabric, an engineered wearable material that senses environmental stimuli and responds to varying conditions with changes in mechanical properties such as stiffness. She worked with Chiara Daraio, G. Bradford Jones Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Physics.

Credit: Lance Hayashida/Caltech

Over the summer, Rahul Chawlani (left) turned up the heat to study the composition of rock samples from the Great Oxygenation Event, a time more than 2 billion years ago when Earth's atmospheric oxygen spiked. In collaboration with Claire Bucholz, assistant professor of geology, he warmed the samples in an oven that reached more than 1,000 degrees Celsius to remove trapped water so that he could obtain a pure sample of the rock.

Credit: Lance Hayadisha/Caltech

Caltech junior Tyler Nguyen (second from right) worked with Mory Gharib (PhD '83), Hans W. Liepmann Professor of Aeronautics and Bioinspired Engineering, on a fish-inspired robot that can propel itself through water using a mechanical fin. Such underwater robots are used in deep-sea surveys and could one day be used to explore extraterrestrial ocean worlds such as Europa and Enceladus.

Credit: Lance Hayashida/Caltech