GCSP Student Experiences

Cameron Morgan (DAAD-RISE Award):

For three months over the summer of 2022, I conducted research and lived in Freiberg, Germany. My research consisted of creating and testing my own samples for NOx reduction (DeNOx) using hydrogen as a reductant. NOx is harmful to the environment so we are trying to convert it into nitrogen, an inert and non-harmful gas. During that time I was able to travel around Germany to many cities such as Dresden, Berlin, Hamburg, Leipzig, and Munich, as well as travel to Czech and Austria. Being immersed in German culture for three months allowed me to experience a completely different way of life while learning a bit of German and trying many new kinds of food. They have amazing vegan food there too!!

Sumi Ramachandran (EPICS Elite Pitch Competition and Venture Devils):  As the EPICS Mayo Radiology Reclining Back team lead, I enrolled my team to participate in several pitch competitions including the EPICS Elite Pitch Competition and Venture Devils. The competitions were created to allow student teams an opportunity to obtain additional funding to implement our solutions and provide a positive impact on the communities that we were working with. My team won first place and was awarded $2,500 for funding on our R-Trek wheelchair project at the EPICS Pitch Competition and placed second at Venture Devils and was awarded an additional $1,500. By accomplishing my entrepreneurship competency, I have gained invaluable experience in the field of engineering and developed an understanding of the necessity of a viable business model for solution implementation. At the core of it all, the desire for a working product, the high expectation that you will make something that works and serves people well, should be the guiding force behind all engineering endeavors, medical or not. I aspire to translate innovation to invention by scaling market ventures to global solutions in the future!
Hailey Petsch (EPICS IN VIETNAM: GIE program): This fall I spent 10 days in Vietnam with a group of 11 other engineering students to use my engineering skills to help farmers in Vietnam. We spent time visiting farmers to try to understand the problems they face and what needs to be done to improve their work. We then went back to a local university and spent hours working together, creating, and prototyping solutions that would be able to help meet their needs and make farming easier and more sustainable for these people! It was such an amazing experience where I was able to make new friends and meet people abroad!

Riley Seminara (I received the Martin Hudson Scholarship for Carbon Capture and Sustainable Energy): I received the Martin Hudson Scholarship for Carbon Capture and Sustainable Energy because of my lab research where I am making catalysts to catalyze the hydrogenation of carbon dioxide into reduced compounds, such as formic acid, formaldehyde, and methanol. An article was written about my accomplishment in the ASU news.

Carol Lu (EPICS Global – Vietnam Study Abroad): Can a team of mere students truly design a worthwhile tool that helps sustain small-scale farmers across the globe while serving their community and environment? Certainly by just working in a classroom space off of internet information — however well-stocked either source might be — the answer will be “no.” But with the direct human connection to stakeholders and collaborators, our united hopes can be answered with “yes.” As part of Engineering Projects in Community Service (EPICS), I had the opportunity to travel with the Vietnam Shrimp Farming team to Da Nang, Vietnam as part of a Global Intensive Experience (GIE) in the first two weeks of August 2022. We brought with us only the concept of an IoT device for water quality monitoring, a set of tangled Arduinos and probes, and research statistics on shrimp health and the tumultuous economic turns intensive farms often undergo.  With each conversation and new experience, the more I connected with my Vietnamese friends, even exchanging jokes in Chinese words (since we all knew a bit) and discussing interesting cultural discrepancies from Asia to America. But in the end, what can I say? Indeed, though Vietnam is almost perfectly the opposite side of the globe from Arizona, and our languages and cultures similarly poles apart, yet we are still connected by the same ocean’s waters and build towards the same engineering goals.