St. Thomas offers graduate and undergraduate students the opportunity to do research with faculty, to connect personally with professors and to not be “just a number” in the classroom. One of the most common benefits students cite about their St. Thomas education is the ability to connect with faculty members, which supports students’ academic work and personal growth.
Students have the option of collaborating with a faculty mentor to tackle independent projects outside the conventional curriculum. Research at the University of St. Thomas teaches students how to trouble-shoot, persevere, and communicate technically. Students learn more about themselves and understand the connections between the various engineering courses and labs. Additionally, our students frequently co-author published research in respected journals and present their work at conferences.
Get involved to solve real problems.
Our engineering faculty have been awarded major grants from NIH and NSF for medical research and the purchase of instrumentation that aids in research collaborations with industry partners, curriculum advancements and outreach activities.
Undergraduate civil engineering student Mohamud (Abdi) Abdimuhsin was awarded a Young Scholars research grant to study recycled concrete aggregate (RCA) with faculty mentor Dr. Rita Lederle. He also has been awarded the Charles Pankow Foundation Fellowship, a prestigious national fellowship that both undergraduate and graduate students compete for.
National Medical Research Grant
Electrical and Computer Engineering’s Dr. Lucas Koerner was awarded a prestigious National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant. The grant will be used to create an ion channel open-source amplifier that can be used and modified to make ion channel electrical measurements. Ion channels are critical components of the nervous system; understanding the electronics of these proteins plays an essential part in understanding many neurological diseases.
Our faculty are involved in a wide array of research projects including sustainability, power systems, medical devices, instrumentation, materials and composite, robotics and dynamic systems, Internet of Things, signal processing, heat and fluid flow, structures and more.
These materials are smart materials that can be deformed and moved by a remote magnetic field with applications like artificial muscle. She is exploring how their properties are tuned by internal structure generated by 3D printing.
Her research is at the interface of electronics and the world in order to creatively leverage the tools of analog design to modulate and sense the world.
His research team explores how foundation materials in transportation infrastructure respond to traffic loads and climate changes using innovative sensor technology to tackle infrastructure challenges posed by traffic, climate, and extreme events.
Dr. Salamy is developing robots that can navigate autonomously indoors and outdoors based on Lidar, camera and other sensors including GPS. The robots will work with both humans and other robots.