Connor Pryce, a 4A MME student, won the Student Poster Competition at the 2024 American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics (APS-DFD) conference, the largest international event in Fluid Mechanics—held in Salt Lake City, Utah.
What makes this accomplishment even more significant is that Pryce, an undergraduate, beat out 161 submissions from graduate students across the world, including those from other prestigious institutions such as CalTech, Cambridge and MIT.
“It’s a huge honour. I’m very grateful to have the opportunity and support from Dr. Zhao Pan,” says Pryce.
The poster was based on a paper written by Pryce (as lead) and Lanyu Li, a 2nd year PhD student in the Pan Lab, as well as Dr. Jared Whitehead, a mathematician at Brigham Young University.
The work started when Pryce took Dr. Pan’s ME 303 course on Advanced Engineering Mathematics and expressed interest in the topic. Then, Pryce started to work in the Pan Lab in the Summer of 2023. Dr. Pan showed Pryce an idea, and he got to work on it by reading a few papers and a PhD thesis. He had regular discussions with Dr. Pan and collaborated with Li to get data in order. Within two terms of working in the Pan Lab, Pryce finished the research and was able to publish in Experiments in Fluids, a leading journal in the field, due to Pryce's hard work.
The work itself is very technical, and Pryce had the curiosity and the courage to learn advanced mathematics far beyond common engineering curriculum and to try and find a solution by thinking out of the box.
Li expresses gratitude for the role he played in generating validation data for this research and is proud of the work they were able to complete, saying, “Winning the competition was a tremendous honour.” He also gives a shoutout to his lab and the recognition it brings to his team’s dedication and hard work.
Dr. Pan is very proud of his students: “It is not common for undergraduate students to lead such technical research in my field, but with hard work and determination, Waterloo Engineering students like Connor can pull it off."
Pryce proposed the primary algorithm, which he says “felt like the obvious way forward. The technique was simple in principle, and for what we were trying to accomplish, it seemed like a perfect fit.”
“Within our group,” says Dr. Pan, “we call this method Pryce regularization. Pryce not only figured out this seemingly straightforward yet long-overlooked method that no one has done before when he was a 3B student but also mathematically proved when and why the method works. You usually don’t expect this level of heavy lifting from an undergraduate student.”
It’s great to see continued innovation from our students and the passion they bring to their studies. This proves that you can do anything you set your mind to. Congratulations Connor, Lanyu, and team!