May 18, 2009

ECE Senior Aarestad Earns Best Paper Award

Winning the Best Student Paper Award from the IEEE Albuquerque Section in April wasn't the end of accolades for ECE senior Jim Aarestad, whose paper went on to tie for second place in the IEEE Region 6 (Southwest Area) Student Paper Contest held at the University of California at San Diego on April 25. Aarestad presented the paper during the Southwest Area meeting on that date. He was also toasted at a joint IEEE Albuquerque/UNM Sigma Xi Awards Banquet on May 18 at the Conference Center on UNM's north campus.

Aarestad's paper, titled "SmartCan: Instrumentation, Measurement and Control at 70 Miles Up," describes his ECE senior capstone-project team's sub-orbital mission automation, recording and tracking canister (SmartCan), which was launched from Spaceport America as part of the Aerospace SpaceLoft XL rocket payload on May 2. His teammates on the project were ECE seniors Alireza Ghassemi, Ghadeh Hadi, Jeffrey Rohrbacker and Amir Shirkhorshidian.

A PDF of the paper is here. To see an IEEE report about the Region 6 contest, see this website.