Achievement

IGERT-Lifechips trainee Mark Merlo has been a mentor for two undergraduate students at UCIrvine. Under his supervision, the students worked on different projects and learned about Lifechips. One student, Jenifer Lee-was a sophomore, has finished and she helped him with the modeling and preliminary testing of the acupuncture surface electrodes. Also, under Mark Merlo’s guidance, she was able to: build a CAD model of the bones and nerves in the forearm using Solidworks, model a simple conductive fluid experiment with Comsol and verify the model with actual experiments she designed, analyze the results of the experiments using MatLab, and program a Picaxe for use in an acupuncture stimulation circuit. The other student, Rickin Patel-a junior Computer Science major at UCI- has just started working with Mark Merlo. So far, Rickin has been helping with the programming and circuit design for the thermotacile array project.