Designing a Soft Bioinspired Grasper for Underwater Manipulation 

Mentors Project Description The Morphable Biorobotics Lab at Boston University is developing a bioinspired soft underwater gripper for grasping delicate marine samples. This technology is key to ensuring adaptability in unpredictable environments without inflicting damage to the sample, the environment or the robot itself. This REU project aims to design a soft gripper that encloses […]

Advancing Early Alzheimer’s Detection with Biosensing

Mentors Project Description Our research lab, in Boston University Photonics Center’s Business Innovation Center, is focused on the development of new diagnostic tests to support personalized therapeutic strategies for patients suffering from neurological conditions. Given the increasingly decentralized nature of healthcare and clinical trials, there is a need for easy-to-use, cost-effective remote monitoring tools in […]

Engineering Microenvironment-triggered Self-reporting Immunotherapy

Mentors Project Description Precision medicine has a transformative impact in managing heterogeneous disorders, including cancer, metabolic, and neurological diseases. At the living interface of precision engineering and health, the Hao laboratory develops molecular and cellular tools to precisely track and control disease biology in intact organisms. The specific research interests include (1) noninvasive disease detection […]

Thermocapillary Manipulation of Liquid Optical Waveguides

Mentors Project Description The overall goal of this project is to explore how light can be guided and manipulated inside a thin liquid film, turning it into an optical waveguide with real-time dynamic control over its functionality. If a liquid film is suspended within an immiscible liquid environment, it will maintain uniform and smooth surfaces, […]

Hardware Programming for Nano-Electro-Mechanical Systems

Mentors Project Description The student will conduct background research on hardware programming and will build an all-electrical setup for precision measurement of an electro-mechanical resonator. The student will be provided with relevant hardware and software, including FPGA (field programmable gate arrays) boards, their corresponding IDEs (integrated development environment), and other pieces of electronics. The student […]

Multimaterial 3D Printing of Multifunctional Materials

Mentors Project Description The Additive Assembly Laboratory (AAL) at BU has a variety of active projects that focus on multimaterial 3D printing of multifunctional materials, ranging from 4D printing (3D printing materials that change shape over time in response to a stimulus – time being the fourth axis), 3D printed optics, robots, soft electronics, and […]

Roberto Haubold

Roberto is a Physics student at University College London. Having been interested in STEM in high school, Roberto took on a broad range of courses in his freshman year of college, ultimately majoring in physics and minoring in physical chemistry. He’s currently planning to pursue a PhD after undergrad, and has had a few research […]

Vanessa Moran

Vanessa attends the University of Massachusetts Amherst, majoring in Microbiology with a minor in Spanish. Her time as an REU at Boston University was her first research experience beyond the classroom, and wants to pursue a graduate degree following undergrad. Engineering microenvironment-triggered self-reporting immunotherapy: Vanessa’s project, working alongside Liang Hao in the Hao lab, was […]