One of the best ways to develop the field of Engineering and Robotics is to get more and more students involved in projects that can excite them at a young age. There were a couple of such young minds that I was able to mentor during my time as a PhD student at CCRL.

• Ace Chun joined us during the Spring 2023 semester while they were still a High-School student. Under my mentorship, they helped us develop an annotator which was crucial for some of the annotation tasks that were needed to develop supervised learning methods for localization of magnetic surgical robots.

• Ace is a quick learner and approaches every task with due diligence. They were also able to publish a paper titled, “Facilitating a Hands-On Approach to Open and Modular Engineering Projects through Software Design and Data Collection”, that was accepted at the IEEE Integrated STEM Education Conference (ISEC), 2024.

• Ace’s accomplishments also helped them secure admission at one of the most prestigious Institutions in the country, namely the Computer Science Undergrad Department at MIT.

• During the Spring 2022 semester, Theodore Tagle (Mechanical Engineering Undergrad at UMD at the time) also joined us at CCRL. Under my mentorship, he was able to integrate the support system for a mini Magnetic Robotic System at UMD.

• Theodore also developed the software for training surgeons on maneuvering surgical needles with the Mini Magnetic Robotic System at UMD.