<p>Found some examples of exceptional student research @ JHU which has been supported by the university this year. These seem all to be exceptional students so hats off to JHU and undergraduate research opportunities. </p>
<h1>1) Seniors Jill Lasak and Yoonah Chi are playing an important role in determining whether elderly Koreans who frequently play a challenging board game called Baduk have better cognitive function than do older people who don’t play the game as often. Supported by a PURA, Lasak, a psychology major from Broomall, Pa., and Chi, a neuroscience major from Bethel, Conn., hypothesized that the more a participant played the ancient Chinese game (also called Go), the better that participant’s processing speed, short-term memory and executive cognitive functions would be.</h1>
<h1>2) Avik De, a mechanical engineering major from Kolkata, India, has devised a navigation program that could allow low-cost robots to use simple sensing equipment to figure out their own location and assemble a landmark-based map of their environment, without help from a human operator.</h1>
<h1>3) Nursing student Callie Vincent expected her research to confirm what seemed like a logical connection: Nurses who are bullied and verbally abused at work are more likely later to suffer depression. But her results weren’t quite what she expected. Instead, Vincent’s findings revealed a very different relationship between depression and psychological violence that could lead to more mental health services for nurses.</h1>
<h1>4) Supported by a PURA, David Huberdeau is developing a control system that could enable some amputees to regain hand and finger motions in high-tech prosthetic limbs.</h1>
<p>Huberdeau, a junior biomedical engineering major from Woodbridge, Va., has teamed up with a graduate student to devise a computer program that turns electrical activity in an amputee’s remaining arm muscles into instructions to move the wrist and fingers of a prosthetic limb.</p>
<h1>5) Using a computer model that mimics the behavior of cardiac cells, Grace Tan is studying life-threatening irregular beats in patients with a common condition called heart failure. In such patients, the heart is weakened and cannot pump efficiently. Tan, a junior from Singapore majoring in biomedical engineering and mathematics, conducted her study with support from a PURA. In February, she presented her findings at the Gordon Research Conference on Cardiac Arrhythmias Mechanisms, held in Italy. Of the 160 participants at the conference, Tan was the only undergraduate. Competing against graduate students and postdoctoral and clinical fellows, Tan presented a poster that received the first-place award in its category.</h1>
<h1>6) Born profoundly deaf, Joseph Heng remembers sitting down at the piano in his family’s Singapore living room one day when he was 13 and pressing the keys. Heng, now a sophomore studying biomedical engineering in the Whiting School of Engineering, could discern the sounds of various notes because he had just been surgically fitted with a cochlear implant, a device designed to process and deliver sounds to the auditory nerve, allowing deaf people to hear. Within days, the teenager working his way through his younger sister’s discarded piano books had taught himself to play various songs, and his amazed mother signed him up for piano lessons. Ten years later, Heng is an accomplished pianist who has performed in several concerts, making him one of the very few people worldwide who has learned to play a musical instrument after receiving a cochlear implant.</h1>
<h1>7) Wesley Sudduth didn’t know much about eminent domain or the Fifth Amendment’s “takings clause” until he took Joel Grossman’s two-semester Constitutional Law class. His interest piqued, and with Grossman on board as his faculty sponsor, Sudduth applied for PURA funding for an in-depth study on the history of such cases in the American courts since the 19th century. The project unexpectedly led him to a familiar place: Michigan, where his family moved in 2001. “I started researching the topic and realized that one of the most important fronts in the legal interpretation of eminent domain had taken place not only in my home state but in an adjacent county to mine,” said Sudduth, a junior majoring in international relations and economics. “So one way to look at this project was as a chance to learn more about something pertinent nationwide that took place in my own backyard.”</h1>
<p>[Provost</a> Undergraduate Research Awards - Johns Hopkins University| April 6, 2009](<a href=“http://www.jhu.edu/~gazette/2009/06apr09/06pura.html]Provost”>Johns Hopkins Gazette | April 6, 2009)</p>