Yu Zhang is the program director for the REU site. She is also the director of the Laboratory for Distributed Intelligent Agent Systems at Trinity. Her work has received over $260,000 in support from the National Science Foundation, Association of Colleges in South, Council On Undergraduate Research and Trinity. She has supervised undergraduates in research projects including four Student Research Awards. Dr. Zhang’s research falls within AI and Multi-Agent Systems. She is in the editorial board and program committee for over 30 journals, conferences and technical groups in this area and has regularly reviewed papers and proposals for journals, conferences and federal agencies. She has been active in IEEE Women In Engineering Central Texas Chapter, IEEE Computer Society Central Texas Chapter and IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Society Central Texas Chapter.

Mark Lewis has supervised 11 undergraduate theses and nine independent studies. His students have completed seven NCUR presentations as well as two co-authored proceedings papers. Dr. Lewis was an instructor at the ACS/NITLE Software Engineering Internship in the summers of 2005 and 2006. He has also served as the PI for a NSF RUI program and a Co-PI for a NASA program for simulating planetary ring dynamics. Dr. Lewis has also worked extensively to recruit computer science students through his volunteer work as Trinity ACM competition faculty mentor, faculty mentor of ACM student chapter at Trinity and the organizer of Trinity University Regional High School Programming Competition. Every year, Trinity awards two junior faculty members for Junior Faculty Distinguished Teaching and Research Award. Dr. Lewis was the recipient of the 2006 awards.

Christine Drennon was the other recipient of Trinity Junior Faculty Distinguished Teaching and Research Award in 2006. Although her Ph.D. is in geography, she is a member of the Department of Sociology & Anthropology and is a major contributor to the Urban Studies Program. In addition to teaching introductory and upper-level courses in urban studies and geography, Dr. Drennon teaches the geographic information systems class. The GIS class uses a problem-based learning pedagogy, in which 10 students learn GIS technology through a research/service project. In this way, all are involved in geographic research, as well as learning cartographic and information processing skills. Dr. Drennon’s current research integrates multi-agent systems and GIS to model the urban investment environment.

Participant

Home Institution

Current Status

Jerremy Adams

UT Austin

Completing Undergraduate Degree