Undergraduate Lab Fair opens windows into worlds of research

When Andrew Tu, E’20, arrived at North­eastern last fall, he did not expect to be towing a buoy that stood 7.5 feet tall and 12 inches in diam­eter by hand into the ocean come summer. But that world—a watery world—opened up to him when he con­nected with asso­ciate pro­fessor Ste­fano Basagni at the Col­lege of Engi­neering Under­grad­uate Lab Fair.

“I came to North­eastern knowing I was inter­ested in elec­trical engi­neering but not sure if I wanted to go in the direc­tion of elec­trical com­puter engi­neering or com­puter sci­ence,” says Tu. “And then, at the fair, I saw these microwave-​​sized hardhat yellow balls wired up to a power supply and laptops.”

Tu hadn’t a clue what they were, but he was intrigued. Chat­ting with Basagni, he learned the yellow balls were sophis­ti­cated under­water acoustic modems and part of an under­water wire­less com­mu­ni­ca­tion net­work that Basagni’s lab was devel­oping. Called the North­eastern Uni­ver­sity Marine Obser­va­tory Net­work, or NU MONET, the net­work will bring real-​​time sci­en­tific data from under the sea to researchers on land at the Marine Sci­ence Center. Its poten­tial appli­ca­tions range from envi­ron­mental mon­i­toring to sur­veil­lance for defense measures.

Other under­grad­u­ates can expand their edu­ca­tions through sim­ilar oppor­tu­ni­ties show­cased at this year’s fair on Monday, Sept. 19, in the Curry Stu­dent Center Ball­room from 6 to 7:30 p.m. Stu­dents can explore the work of 32 labs cov­ering fields from nanomed­i­cine to car­dio­vas­cular cell mod­eling, robotics to micro­bial ecology.

“The fair is a phe­nom­enal way to see what research oppor­tu­ni­ties North­eastern offers to under­grad­u­ates,” says Tu. “Within those oppor­tu­ni­ties you can find some­thing you already know you enjoy doing or try some­thing really dif­ferent, like I did. I’ve met incred­ibly knowl­edge­able people, acquired not just tech­nical but com­mu­ni­ca­tion skills, and gained insight into what real-​​life research is like.”

Learning ‘from the ground up’

Funded by a National Sci­ence Foun­da­tion Research Expe­ri­ences for Under­grad­u­ates grant, Tu dove into the research expe­ri­ence with alacrity. He worked eight hours a week on it during the school year and up to 40 hours a week during breaks and over the summer. “I learned every­thing about MONET from the ground up,” he says.

Tu became pro­fi­cient at MATLAB, a pro­gram­ming lan­guage the team uses to con­trol the modems, tested the effi­ciency of var­ious net­working pro­to­cols, and helped design the buoy that he would later tow into the ocean from the Marine Sci­ence Center’s pri­vate beach front. The buoy, loaded with devices including a radio module and WiFi, will pro­vide con­stant power to the net­work as well as reli­able wire­less com­mu­ni­ca­tion to shore.

The ben­e­fits of under­grad­uate research oppor­tu­ni­ties go both ways, says Basagni. “Under­grad­uate stu­dents bring to the table new and orig­inal ways to tackle research chal­lenges,” he says. “Andrew’s inquis­i­tive char­acter and incred­ible curiosity led us to dis­cover new ways of looking at a problem and, with Andrew, to find a solution.”

For their part, he says, “stu­dents have the chance to expe­ri­ence a rad­i­cally dif­ferent way to learn. The learning is not just passed hier­ar­chi­cally from a pro­fessor to the stu­dents, but rather it is a joint endeavor, with both con­tributing to a common goal.”

Tu, who has decided to earn a com­bined bachelor’s degree in com­puter engi­neering and com­puter sci­ence, is con­tin­uing to work on MONET this year. His suc­cess at North­eastern under­scores Basagni’s assess­ment. “I am ahead in my classes,” he says. “The research expe­ri­ence enabled me to learn, before­hand, in a low-​​pressure envi­ron­ment more than I would have by just taking class.”

Out­side the box experiences

That envi­ron­ment extended well beyond the lab. As lead author on an upcoming paper in Embark: North­eastern Under­grad­uate Engi­neering Review, Tu became pro­fi­cient in using LaTex, a sophis­ti­cated type­set­ting system for tech­nical and sci­en­tific doc­u­ments. He was a co-​​author of a peer-​​reviewed paper that will be pre­sented on Wednesday at the Oceans 2016 con­fer­ence in Mon­terey, Cal­i­fornia. And he was selected to present a poster about his research at the annual REU Sym­po­sium, hosted by the Council on Under­grad­uate Research, in Arlington, Vir­ginia, in October.

“I’ve learned what it means to be a researcher not just in the lab but in terms of writing papers, designing posters, and giving pre­sen­ta­tions,” says Tu.

At the invi­ta­tion of Basagni, he also trav­eled to Italy to learn how to use a new soft­ware product devel­oped by a team of researchers at Sapienza, Uni­ver­sità di Roma that at once sim­u­lates, emu­lates, and tests novel com­mu­ni­ca­tion pro­to­cols for under­water net­working. Funded by a travel grant from the Global Envi­ron­ment for Net­work Inno­va­tions, Tu spent two weeks with the researchers and one week trav­eling solo—another new world for him.

“The research opened doors to unex­pected oppor­tu­ni­ties,” says Tu. “I went to Italy. I became scuba cer­ti­fied. An intro­duc­tion to under­water net­working led me down trails I couldn’t have imag­ined before coming to Northeastern.”