2021 MME Graduate Research Symposium highlights

On March 17, 2021, the Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering community gathered together to celebrate and learn about the innovative research taking place in the department at the 4th annual MME Graduate Research Symposium.

With the largest attendance to date, this event had many other “firsts”. It was the first time the event was held online, the first collaboration and sponsorship from the Conrad School of Entrepreneurship and Business and featured the first ever entrepreneurship award.

A total of 16 participants shared their leading research work through presentations and posters and interacted with attendees during the Q&A periods. In addition to the research presentations, Dr. Wayne Chang from Conrad School of Entrepreneurship and Business and Dr. Nadine Fladd from Writing and Communication Centre provided some insight through their special guest presentations.

The panel of judges, Dr. Tan, Dr. Teertstra, and Dr. Daun, evaluated the presentations and the following awards were presented:

• 1st Place – Jiacheng (Sola) Weng, “Natural Walking with Musculoskeletal Models Using Deep Reinforcement Learning”
• 2nd Place – Kissan Mistry, “A Novel Zinc Oxide Resonant Cantilever Humidity Sensor”
• 3rd Place – Shehryar Khan, “Effects of Colloidal Graphite Coating on Weld Properties During Fiber Laser Welding of Al-Si Coated 22MnB5 Steel”
• Entrepreneurship Award – Kissan Mistry 
• Peoples’ Choice Award for Best Poster – Matthew Cann, “Mode Classification for Vortex Shedding from an Oscillating Cylinder using Machine Learning