Department Recognizes Two NSF Fellowship Award Winners
Two mechanical engineering students were recently awarded the National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship that provides three years of support for graduate study leading to research-based master's or doctoral degrees; totaling an amount of nearly $121,500 for each award recipient.
Hannah Gustafson, a current graduate student in mechanical engineering, is studying biomechanics and hopes to pursue a doctoral degree with her award. She's conducting research in the field of injury biomechanics while at Ohio State and working in the Injury Biomechanics Research Lab under John Bolte IV, professor in anatomy and mechanical engineering.
Gustafson currently works to make crash-test dummies more biofidelic by testing different types of impacts on the dummies and relating those test results to data on the cadavers. Her research is important because she's finding that not all crash-test dummies respond the way an actual human might when impacted during a vehicle accident. Gustafson notes that she could use her funding for a potential project to find factors that influence rib fracture tolerance.
"One of the nice things about this NSF fellowship," says Gustafson, "is that it provides me opportunities to work on a project that's of interest to me-and I'm not limited to working on a current project that one professor might have initiated."
Julie Thompson, a current undergraduate student in mechanical engineering, is also studying biomechanics. Thompson is enrolled in the BS/MS track of courses in mechanical engineering and will complete her bachelor's degree this spring. She works in the Neuromuscular Biomechanics Lab at Ohio State under Rob Siston, assistant professor in mechanical engineering.
Her undergraduate research and Honors Thesis Project involved the design and construction of a cadaver knee motion testing device.
"There are hundreds of thousands of knee replacement surgeries that take place every year," says Thompson. "While the technology for surgeries improves all the time-after surgery, people still can't perform at the exact level they could beforehand. We're looking to find how those surgeries affect knee motion after the fact."
Thompson's future research while pursuing her graduate degree will use a forward dynamic computer simulation to investigate how changing the prosthetic component alignment in total knee replacements will affect the knee motion and function.
Both Thompson and Gustafson will receive three years of paid tuition, fees, and room and board; they'll also receive an annual stipend of $30,000.
The Graduate Research Fellowship Program at NSF is designed to provide opportunities for advanced education that prepares students for a broad range of disciplinary and cross-disciplinary careers through its strategic investments in intellectual capital.
