Student earns national research award
A student at USU received national recognition earlier this week for participation in undergraduate research with robotics and cancer therapies.
Art Mahoney, senior in computer science and computational mathematics, was awarded the Computing Research Association’s Outstanding Undergraduate Award in the runner-up male category. He will formally be presented with the award in the spring in an awards ceremony for the College of Science.
Mahoney put together an application packet and sent it to the CRA. Five committee members from the association sorted through thousands of these applications to decipher who was most deserving of the honors, Mahoney said.
Mahoney has been working on this research since he was a freshman, he said. He has worked with numerous other research projects in the past but is most involved in parallel motion planning and parallel search strategies for cancer therapies, Mahoney said.
“I always liked robots. In high school I would work with computers a lot and play around with Lego robots,” Mahoney said.
Currently Mahoney’s “play” has been diverted to more sophisticated means, helping to research how to expand on robotic motion, he said.
Utah State has a robot in the engineering and mathematics departments, but the majority of the research is done virtually.
“Robots are extremely expensive. In research we use computer simulations, they’re free,” Mahoney said.
With his research on parallel search strategies for cancer therapies, Mahoney works with a group that includes two of the university’s professors. The group is working primarily with angiogenesis, the process of the growth of blood vessels, especially in and around tumors.
“The blood vessels carry oxygen through the blood, we are looking to starve tumors,” he said.
From his research Mahoney said that he has learned a lot both personally and professionally.
“I’ve learned to never stop trying, even though the results look bad. Keep digging deeper into the problem and to think critically about different issues,” he said.
Mahoney plans on pursuing a Ph.D. and to continue with his research in robotics. He would like to work with robotic systems for search and rescue.
“(Sept. 11) raised a lot of issues for search and rescue – there’s a need to find these people. Humans aren’t as capable to search through rubble, because of the danger. Robots would be useful in searching – they are a lot more expendable than human lives,” Mahoney said.
–beck.turner@aggiemail.usu.edu