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“It is a well-established fact that many aspects of research conducted by our University teams depend on the high-quality work of undergraduate students,” says Prof. Sam Mil’shtein, director of the Advanced Electronic Technology Center in the Electrical & Computer Engineering (ECE) Department. “The bigger the number of freshmen with high GPA scores, the better it is for the UMass Lowell campus.”
This was clearly demonstrated by ECE undergrad students Mike Baier, Chris Granz and Paula Bustos, who are all on the Dean’s List and are members of Mil’shtein’s research group. Their work won the first prize for best research paper at this year’s IEEE International Conference on Homeland Security Technologies held recently in Waltham.
Competing with Ph.D. student presenters from universities across the US and abroad, the UMass Lowell team (Baier was the speaker) not only presented the paper — “Mobile System for Fingerprinting and Mapping of Blood Vessels across a Finger” — but also demonstrated a prototype of the contactless fingerprinting system, which is designed to be installed in police and border-patrol cruisers.
Such a system, according to Mil’shtein, is more accurate than the traditional ink fingerprinting method since there is no distortion of the fingertips’ dermal patterns. For more information, see a previous eNews story on Mil'shtein's research.
In addition, Bustos was featured in the website of the Hispanic Engineer National Achievement Awards Conference (HENAAC) as the “Scholar of the Week” from April 27 to May 3. “This important organization was established in 1989 as a means of identifying, honoring and documenting the contributions of outstanding Hispanic American science, engineering, technology and math professionals,” says Mil’shtein. “Paula is the recipient of a HENAAC scholarship.”