URECA/VIP Symposium Showcases Student Innovation and Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration
Multidisciplinary collaboration was evident in every corner of the Student Activities Center (SAC) Ballrooms at the 2025 Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities (URECA) Celebration and Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) Symposium on April 30.
The annual event featured 222 student research posters and 24 multi-semester VIP projects, representing students from across the humanities, social sciences, engineering, health sciences and natural sciences.
“There are so many things I love about the URECA event — the curiosity and enthusiasm, the interactions between students, faculty and staff, the whole range of projects from anesthesiology to women’s studies,” said Karen Kernan, director of programs for research and creative activity. “The URECA Celebration was one of the first truly multidisciplinary events that brought together people from departments and colleges all across campus. Every poster is a story — of curiosity, creativity, problems tackled and sometimes solved — but most of all, of a student who has found the joy of discovery and wants to tell you about it.”
Posters explored topics ranging from linguistics and literature to biomedical engineering and environmental science. And in the VIP showcase, long-term, team-based projects demonstrated how collaboration across disciplines can result in real-world solutions and transformative student experiences.
“It’s a great opportunity for students to showcase all of the hard work they’ve been doing throughout the semester,” said Leanne Demay, manager of the VIP program in the Career Center. “Everybody has been working on such cool, unique projects, and it’s a great way to see how students can join forces and make one big project come to life—from solar racing fields and motorboats to approaches for tissue-engineered kidneys. It’s really great to see.”
VIP projects are designed to be long-term and multidisciplinary, offering students the chance to build on their work semester after semester while mentoring newer teammates.
“One of the highlights of the VIP team experience is that students can work with people from different majors and class years,” said faculty mentor Mei Lin (Ete) Chan-Lo from the Department of Biomedical Engineering. “You’ll see engineering students collaborating with journalism students or with peers from the College of Business. That’s one of the coolest aspects — multidisciplinary and long-term. They start as freshmen and grow into mentors by their senior year.”
Among the VIP projects on display was Go Baby Go, a team adapting ride-on toy cars for children with physical and cognitive disabilities. “We take these cars and modify them to help kids transition toward using a wheelchair,” said Aayan Rahman, a sophomore biomedical engineering major. “We’ve added 3D-printed belt buckles for support, modified the circuitry to limit speed, and installed simple button controls or remote systems for guardians. We’re now working on integrating joystick control for older kids, based on caregiver feedback.”
Other highlights included Carnival Game, a physical therapy tool inspired by the Kentucky Derby race game, designed for kids and adults recovering from orthopedic injuries. “It’s an interactive game that turns physical rehab into something visual and fun,” said Diana Pinto, a sophomore biomedical engineering major. The system uses pressure and flex sensors to track standing movements and move a figure along a racetrack. “We got great feedback from local physical therapists, and we’re working on adapting it for broader use.”
Teammate Franchesca Jayden, also a sophomore majoring in biomedical engineering, added, “It was so much fun. We had to learn everything from scratch, apply what we learned in class, and really figure things out as a team. It was creative, challenging, and incredibly rewarding.”
In the URECA project Visualizing Attention in BERT Models, students visualized how transformer models, like the ones that power ChatGPT, actually interpret human language. “We’re showing how machines ‘pay attention’ to different words when processing a sentence,” explained Jung Soo Shin, a senior majoring in computer science. “It helps students and professionals alike understand how these models work under the hood, not just that they work.”
Chen Zhu, also a senior majoring in computer science, added, “A lot of people use these models without understanding what’s happening behind the scenes. We wanted to visualize that process, to really open the black box and help others grasp how machines learn patterns in language.”
Ronald George’s passion for history came through in his project on John Dickinson, on display in the URECA Ballroom, who he described as “the forgotten Founding Father.” His presentation explored Dickinson’s legacy and his underappreciated role in shaping early American political thought.
“I had never heard of John Dickinson — no one talks about him,” he said. “But if you really look at that time, his name shows up everywhere. He wrote Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, which helped unify support against British taxation. He was one of the strongest legal minds of the era.”
George, a first year political science major, said the project opened his eyes to the foundations of constitutional government and the complexity of political leadership.
“Dickinson was all about unity, and I think he’d hate how divided things are today. His whole thing was building a united front. He even had to navigate tricky situations as governor of Pennsylvania — like the Paxton Boys massacre — without military or police support. He knew when to step back politically even if he wanted to act. That kind of restraint and strategy was powerful.”
“History teaches us how people handled conflict, how they led, and how they failed. It’s our job to preserve that, especially now,” he added.
— Beth Squire
