William Matern, from Kingston, New Hampshire, is a University Honors Program student who will graduate in May 2012 with a Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering. Will began his research in biomechanics in Dr. Gregory Chini’s Fluid Mechanics class and has continued it through a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) in 2011 and for his senior honors thesis. Will said that he found keeping up to date in the sciences is crucial to conducting research, and he had to pick up a lot of physiology and some biology to understand his research subject. The result is that he has learned that it “takes a lot of thinking, reading, and writing to push human knowledge forward.” What has been most satisfying to him in this experience is the confidence his studies have given him and how well prepared he was to approach new problems. Only the repeated failures and lack of results that occur in research have been frustrating.
He chose to write for Inquiry rather than for a scientific journal because it is accessible to readers of many different backgrounds, and he is glad to have the opportunity to share what he and his team have learned. Will plans to go to graduate school because of his “great research experience,” which showed him how much interesting research is going on in biology. He plans to pursue a doctoral degree in one of several related fields in bioengineering and mathematical biology.
Dr. Gregory Chini, an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and co-director of the CEPS Program in Integrated Applied Mathematics, has worked at the University of New Hampshire for 12 years. His research and teaching interests are in the allied fields of applied mathematics and fluid dynamics, with a particular focus on environmental and biological flows. Dr. Chini frequently mentors undergraduate researchers, but this is his first experience mentoring an Inquiry author. He began working with Will Matern almost two years ago, and said that he has rarely seen an undergraduate who combines genuine creativity and intellectual independence with a true command of the fundamentals of mechanics, mathematics, and numerics as capably as Will does. According to Chini, writing for a broad audience has been a rewarding obligation that comes with the privilege of performing scientific and engineering research.
Read Will Matern's research article Using Mathematics to Gain Insights into Biology: An Application in Respiratory Mechanics >>
