Hisham Ali is coming off a long night at the Structures Lab in Hardaway Hall. Living amid a collection of wooden models, live wires and Domino’s pizza boxes, Ali, a senior majoring in aerospace engineering, clasps his hands behind his head and stretches.
“What’s been killing me,” he says, “is building this hovercraft.”
As the team leader of his senior design project that will culminate with a hovercraft race against Auburn, Ali brings to the table knowledge he has collected from class, experience and research.
The hovercraft is also among the last in a long line of projects that have led Ali to the doorsteps of schools like MIT and Stanford, where he has been accepted for graduate school. Those schools join a list of institutions, including NASA, that have presented him with opportunities for the future.
“I plan on attending graduate school,” he said. “I’m studying material formation via rapid prototyping for functional end use… [At NASA], we tried to engineer a 3D printer for use in micro-gravity.”
At the University, Ali has participated in significant undergraduate research developing a spray paint that will, when photographed and scanned, will allow engineers to say in advance whether a material will fail.
“We’re working towards greater consistency and applicability on complex surfaces,” he said. “It’s almost more of an art than a science, and it’s a major advancement in the field.”
He has been involved with this research project for most of his undergraduate career, under the direction of Paul Hubner. At first, he worked on a project that was a cog within another project, but eventually Ali took the reins of his own project.
“One thing I welcomed was a sense of independence. That’s really what helps you grow ultimately. Now I’m in the position that when new people come into the lab, I show them,” he said. “Time and time again, undergraduate students have shown they can do real work. Within my classes, I end up being ahead of the coursework required because I’ve already done something in the lab, all because of my involvement in research.”
This invasion of undergraduate research experience is not unlike what professor Guy Caldwell, co-founder of “The Worm Shack” laboratory, calls a culture of research – his laboratory has a foosball table and he hosts tailgates before games.
“It’s not for every student, but the ones that do embrace the culture have gone places,” Caldwell said. “I want students to embrace that culture. It all flows from a common desire to make a difference through our work.”
His lab uses a roundworm, C. elegans, “the single most understood animal on the planet,” to investigate diseases of the nervous system, including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, epilepsy and dystonia.
“That wealth of information that exists enables us to ask very specific questions of the biological systems and get very definitive answers,” he said. “Having a system that’s simple enough that undergraduates can generate meaningful data with it is a key to our lab being successful.”
Freshmen and sophomores at “The Worm Shack” primarily deal with the processing of data, but Caldwell said by the time his researchers are juniors, they are expected to be independent both in action and thought.
“The ones that really embrace undergraduate research by the time they’re juniors and seniors are not only capable of doing experiments, but are coming up with ideas that can lead our labs in different directions,” he said. “In fact, our lab wouldn’t be working on Parkinson’s if it hadn’t been an undergraduate student who approached me with a grant from the Michael J. Fox Foundation and convinced me we should be working on it.”
Caldwell said he wants his researchers to understand that in its finest form, research is serious fun.
The reward, he said, is that interviewers and committees at top programs are blown away by the depth and immersion of undergraduate students vying for acceptance.
“Research is a game-changer,” he said. “These are people that are at hardcore research institutions who are recognizing that the students here have more than an average experience in the lab.”
Alumni of “The Worm Shack” have gone on to medical schools and graduate programs at Vanderbilt University, Cambridge University and University of California San Francisco. Those students, he said, took advantage of an opportunity.
“I’m big on opportunity. I want people to recognize that being in a research lab is a rare opportunity that can open all kinds of doors for them,” he said. “If they don’t want to step into that opportunity, someone else will, and they will shine.”
He said he understands students in his lab are often still growing and defining themselves, because he was once in those shoes. As the first Robert E. Lee Scholar at Washington & Lee University, Caldwell found research “exceedingly cool.” For him, connecting dots in a labratory is still exciting.
“Undergraduate research changed my life,” he said. “I still get goosebumps when students say they’ve generated a new strain. I want to hold them and shake them and say do you realize what you’ve done? You’ve created a new life form that never existed on this planet, and you made it happen. Stop for a minute and think about how cool that is. We do it for a living and for the higher purpose of curing disease. It’s a nice way to spend the days.”
Leading in today’s Crimson White:
Tide to face rival Auburn Tigers
