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Webb School of Engineering
FROM THE WEBB
DEAN’S INTRODUCTION
From the Dean:
Welcome to the Spring 2024 edition of the newsletter for the Webb School of Engineering. As you read this newsletter, you’ll see that the students and faculty of the school have been busy. Faculty have been publishing, working with and mentoring students, teaching classes, and the students have been performing exceptionally well in competitions, and successfully being accepted into top graduate programs across the country. Some notable achievements include electrical and computer engineering students finishing second in the IEEE SoutheastCon robotics competition, beating out rivals from well known schools. The placing is even more impressive when you realize that the HPU team consisted of mostly sophomores while some other universities had teams consisting of their senior students completing their senior design project.
Cybersecurity students finished 9th in the National Cyber League competitions in Spring 2024 – another impressive result which will surely see HPU rise in the national rankings once again. Finally, students have been accepted into graduate programs in some of the best graduate programs in the country, which students being offered places in programs at Carnegie Mellon, Duke, Clemson, Northwestern, and more. Obviously, HPU is doing something right and students are being set up for great careers.
Michael Oudshoorn Dean, Webb School of Engineering
DEPARTMENTAL NEWS: ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING
Message from the Chair
by Dr. Claire McCullough
Welcome to the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at High Point! This is a very exciting time for our department. This May, we had our first two electrical engineering graduates, which will enable us to pursue ABET accreditation, with an evaluation visit planned in October. This will open many doors for both our students and our graduates, and will be the culmination of our years of effort.
We are in the process of setting up a new Power laboratory for the program with state-of-the-art educational equipment, and are excited about the possibilities this will open up to our students.
In January, we welcomed Dr. Douglas Isenberg, an electrical engineer with experience in controls and robotics: This gives us a total of five faculty members, and enabled us to fully implement both electrical and computer engineering curricula.
Our faculty are actively engaged in interesting research. In summer 2024, Dr. Eve Klopf will continue her work in the NASA Glenn Faculty Fellowship Program, modeling microwave signal propagation on the lunar surface—see an interview with her on this experience in this issue. Dr. Sean Johnson is very active in research with undergraduate students, and in developing our new Power lab. Dr. Geraldine Shirley Nicholas is continuing her work in the hardware aspects of computer security. Our new robotics and controls professor, Dr. Douglas Isenberg, is setting up a motion capture lab to enhance his work with robots. Thinking over the events of this school year in Electrical and Computer Engineering at High Point, and how I would characterize our programs. I really think we can best be described in terms of compassion and competition.
For competition, this year our robotics club participated for the first time in the robotics hardware competition at IEEE SoutheastCon, an annual professional engineering conference. Many well-known engineering schools in the southeast compete every year, with some making it a part of their engineering capstone design. This year, our team came in second to Clemson, with Bob Jones and Virginia Tech tied for third, in a field of 47 teams. This shows that our students can compete with anyone!
As to compassion, our faculty and students celebrated Martin Luther King Day and Engineers’ Week by working with disadvantaged children in the community—something I hope to do much more of in the future.
This newsletter includes pictures and more information on both, but I think those two sets of events really represent who we are.
If you would like to talk to us about our engineering programs, please email me at cmccullo@highpoint.edu. We would love to hear from you!
Dr. Claire McCullough
Dr. Claire McCullough
Professor and Chair, Electrical and Computer Engineering
by Dr. Eve Klopf
IEEE SoutheastCon is a prestigious competition that many universities participate in annually. The Robotics team, competing for the first time, came in 2nd place in a field of 47 teams from all over the Southeast.
HPU Robotics Club Team Wins 2nd Place at IEEE SoutheastCon’s 2024 Student Hardware Competition
Faculty and students celebrated Martin Luther King Day and Engineers’ Week by working with disadvantaged children in the community
DEPARTMENTAL NEWS: COMPUTER SCIENCE
Message from the Chair
by Dr. Michael Oudshoorn
Michael Oudshoorn Dean, Webb School of Engineering
Computer science freshmen numbers continue to grow year after year. The August 2024 intake will be the largest ever. The demand is testament to the strength of the program and the excellent reputation it enjoys. About half of the incoming freshmen will be in the new cybersecurity program, and the other half in computer science. The students are active in club activities and competitions also. The cybersecurity students recently finished 9th the in National Cyber League competition. This impressive performance highlights the value of a balance between theory and practice, and spotlights the strength of the program. The graduating class once again has an almost 100% employment rate, and students choosing to pursue a graduate degree are being accepted into some of the best graduate programs in the country: Carnegie Mellon, Duke, Northwestern, Clemson, and more. Our students are truly extraordinary.
Computer Science Chair Contributes to New Computer Science Curricula
Michael Oudshoorn, Dean of the School of Engineering, and Professor of Computer Science, recently completed 3 years as a member of the ACM/IEEE-CS/AAAI joint steering committee for Computer Science Curricula. The final report, known as CS2023, will guide the discipline globally for the next decade. The guidelines are also used to inform the accreditation agencies, such as ABET, about curricula content that they should expect to see in computer science programs.
Michael Oudshoorn was the lead for the Foundations of Programming Languages knowledge area, and also served as a member of the Parallel and Distributed Computing knowledge area. His involvement with the project continues as outreach efforts continue to disseminate the guidelines. Dr. Oudshoorn is particularly involved in disseminating the curricula guidelines throughout Central and South America, Asia and Africa.
Computer Science Student to begin SuRi Program
Liza Nikitsenka, a Computer Science/ Cybersecurity student has been accepted into HPU’s 2024 Summer Research Institute (SuRI) Program. She will be working under the guidance a supervision of Dr. Luis Cueva Parra in the project “Efficiency and Accuracy of AI-based models for estimating calories and nutrients in food captured in images.
Computer Science to Work on an NSF-funded Project for Summer 2024
Ky Nguyen, a student majoring in Data Science with an Economics minor will be working during Spring 2024 and Summer 2024 on an NSF-funded project lead by Dr. Luis Cueva Parra. The project “A Modular Multilayer Framework for Real-Time Hyperspectral Image Segmentation” involves developing highperformance machine learning methods for
Liza Nikitsenka
DEPARTMENTAL NEWS: MATHEMATICAL SCIENCES
Message from the Chair
by Dr. Rob Harger
Welcome to the Department of Mathematical Sciences! This year the department conducted multiple national searches and we will welcome new faculty and current faculty in new roles for fall. Dr. Jenny Sharpe has been selected to serve as the Chair of the Department of Mathematical Sciences. Dr. Sharpe arrived at HPU in the fall of 2009 and was promoted to the rank of professor in the fall of 2023. Dr. Brielle Spencer-Tyree has been at HPU as an instructor since 2014 and she completed her PhD at Virginia Tech in 2019. Dr. Spencer-Tyree applied and was selected for one of three assistant professor positions we hired this year. The department looks forward to working with Brielle in her new role.
We continue to focus on recruiting students for our four programs of study: Actuarial Science, Data Analytics and Statistics, Mathematical Economics, and Mathematics. We look forward to opportunities where we can visit high schools, math clubs, and math events to share information about our department, programs, and our students’ opportunities and successes.
I look forward to hearing from you!
Dr. Rob Harger Professor of Mathematics Interim Chair of the Department of Mathematical Sciences
Dr. Jenny Sharpe
Dr. Brielle Spencer-Tyree
FACULTY FEATURE
Dr. Jakub Michel
Dr. Jakub Michel teaches course in statistical literacy, data mining and predictive analytics and mathematics with business applications. He is part of the Mathematical Association of America(MAA) Project NExT 2023/2024 cohort and serves as a trustee on the Wat Lao American Buddhist board. He has a passion for teaching students and assisting them in developing their understand in statistics. His current research interests include increasing statistical literacy in media, non-parametric trend estimation and the development of machine learning and AI tools.
1. What motivated you to choose your field of practice and what do you enjoy about it?
I’ve always enjoyed mathematics, and ever since I was the age of eight or nine, I set myself out that I wanted to be a professor, although at that time I wanted to focus on astronomy. Well, that was until many years later I took physics in high school and realized I was horrible at grasping physics concepts. It was at this time I also took an AP Stats class, loved the Stats class and decided that this was the field I wanted to get into.
There are many things I enjoy about statistics so it’s very hard for me to narrow down anything specific, however at the end I would have to say is that it is very versatile. It’s a field of mathematics that can be applied to any subject area and can be used in any field in industry. And it is due to this versatility that makes me enjoy statistics because I can learn a lot about many different subjects without being an expert in them, however I can understand the statistical language that is applied to those subject areas making me appreciate them in even more.
2. What are your current research interests?
Even though my specialization is in time series estimation and non-parametric estimation, I’ve enjoyed and wanted to get more involved in the education of statistics to individuals to have people be more statistically literate and aware. This has been mostly caused by the increase spread of misinformation
in many areas and the increase in AI over the year. Therefore, I would like to shift my focus a bit more on how people can identify misinformation quickly and how they should learn to work with AI instead of rejecting it completely.
3. What are you most excited about in regards to the upcoming semester?
I’m really excited to get to see the new set of students who will be entering HPU and continue working with the current students that are within and outside of our program. I would particularly like to get a few students involved in more research projects outside of the classroom.
4. Do you have any hobbies/interests outside of work that you would like to share?
I like to play video games on my spare time with some friends and family members that I have since most of them live out of state.
I’m also a travel enthusiast so I enjoy visiting new places and trying out new food. Lastly, I am heavily involved at my local temple so you’ll generally find me there most weekends volunteering with my friends.
5. If you could go back in time, what, if anything, would you do differently as a student?
As a student I would try to get myself to focus more on publications and get involved in projects that I would have enjoyed more.
FACULTY FEATURE
Dr. Luis Cueva-Parra
Dr. Luis A. Cueva Parra expertise is in Scientific Computing, Data Science, and Computational Science and Engineering. He has taught a variety of Computer Science courses such as Programming, Analysis of Algorithms, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and High Performance Computing. Currently, he teaches courses such as Data Visualization, Database Systems, and Website Development.
He is interested in the implementation of research-based high impact practices in Computer Science Education and in the involvement of undergraduate students in research projects.
1. What motivated you to choose your field of practice and what do you enjoy about it?
Since a very young age I have enjoyed learning and experimenting with things, and I was looking for solving problems all around. I really wanted to discover or design something that is transformative for the benefit of our society. I wanted to be a researcher and work in a national lab. This led me to choose what I thought a researcher should know and be prepared for. My education is in Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, and Industrial Engineering at the bachelor level, in Industrial Mathematics at the master level and in Scientific Computing at the PhD level.
During my education I realized that the most fundamental and transformative tools and techniques that can be used to solve a wide variety of scientific, industrial, or social problems come from the Computer Science and Mathematics fields. In addition, the impressive development in computing technologies such as the GPGPU and its corresponding software for high performance make these fields more relevant, current, and transformative. So, I want to be in these fields experimenting and enjoying new discoveries every day.
Being in academia gives me the most enjoyment possible because teaching is the best way to continuously learn, explore and solve problems. When I am surrounded with students, I feel alive by teaching, guiding, and mentoring them.
2. What are your current research interests?
Currently I am interested in developing and optimizing mathematical and computing models that can be used for solving a variety of challenging problems. One problem that I am working on is in optimizing machine learning models for high performance with applications in hyperspectral image segmentation. These models should be fast, correct within an acceptable error margin, reproducible, trustful, and unbiased.
3. What are you most excited about in regards to the upcoming semester?
I am excited that the Computer Science program is growing. We will have more enrolled students as well as a new faculty member. We will be offering more and diverse courses. I am very excited about the opportunities for collaboration that every new semester brings.
4. Do you have any hobbies/interests outside of work that you would like to share?
I enjoy traveling, jogging, listening to all types of music and playing soccer.
5. If you could go back in time, what, if anything, would you do differently as a student?
When I was an undergraduate student, I was very shy and rarely (almost never) asked questions in class or during office hours. To look for answers I went to the library for countless hours. If I could go back in time, I would like to be less shy and be able to ask questions in class such that I could learn more and faster than otherwise. This would make me be more productive.
STUDENT SPOTLIGHT
Gabriella Green B.S., Mathematical Economics, 2023
What are you studying at HPU?
I am a graduate student at HPU working towards my MBA. I finished my undergraduate studies at HPU last May and majored in mathematical economics with a minor in political science.
Why did you choose HPU?
I chose HPU because the experiential learning and career development opportunities were unmatched. I knew that both faculty and students at HPU would encourage and support me in my academic and extracurricular pursuits.
What interests do you have outside of
Outside of my major, I am very interested in law. Growing up, I was always very interested in law but did not think math and law went together. To my surprise, I had many opportunities in my major classes to delve into legal topics from a mathematical or economic perspective.
4. What are some of the challenges that you have faced or overcome this semester?
My biggest challenge this semester was definitely time management. In addition to taking classes, I am also working two jobs and navigating the law school application process, which requires lots of time and trips out of town to visit schools.
5. What do you hope to do with your degree when you graduate?
After I graduate in May, I will start law school in the fall with the hopes of practicing transactional law. I am unsure yet where I will attend law school, but I am currently deciding between Cornell, Northwestern, the University of Virginia, the University of Michigan, and Vanderbilt.
6. Are you involved in any activities on campus? In what capacity
As an MBA student, I am not currently living in North Carolina, but last year, I was very involved around campus. I was the Vice President of Circle K, the Secretary of the National Society for Leadership & Success (NSLS), and a member of the Order of the Lighted Lamp, Student Political Science Association, Alpha Lambda Delta, and Phi Alpha Delta. I also completed a research project with Dr. Graham-Squire and previously served as the Treasurer of Campus Civitans. Though I am in Ohio this year, I still try to support the Circle K club and attended their convention last semester.
7. What advice would you like to share with your peers or with future students?
My advice to my peers and future students is to try something new inside or outside the department that requires you to leave your comfort zone. My best academic and extracurricular experiences in college were completing a research project and serving as the VP of Circle K, which I was highly uncomfortable doing and did not think I would be any good at. HPU is a great place to try something new because most things are very low-stakes, and there is a great support system to help ease any discomfort. Trying new things can introduce you to a passion you never knew you had or new friends that will last a lifetime.
STUDENT SPOTLIGHT
Jenny Aguirre
B.S., Electrical Engineering, 2025
1. What are you studying at HPU?
I’m majoring in Electrical Engineering with a Minor in Civic Responsibility and Social Innovation.
2. Why did you choose HPU?
One of the reasons I chose HPU is that President Nido Qubein himself is an immigrant. As a daughter of immigrants, the qualities of working hard and starting from nothing really resonated with me, as well as the growth mindset that is so heavily emphasized at this school. Aside from that, I was really drawn to the small class sizes and hands-on learning.
3. What interests do you have outside of your major?
I love playing music and I’m self taught on the piano and the ukulele. I hope to add the accordion to the list of instruments that I can play. I also love learning new languages, so I’ve been really focused on learning Portuguese, and I plan to learn Italian and French afterwards. Additionally, I love painting with acrylics and doing anything related to arts and crafts.
4. What are some of the challenges that you have faced or overcome this semester?
This semester has been one of my easier semesters academically, so my biggest challenge has been searching for internships. Luckily for me, HPU has a ton of resources available in the Office of Career and Professional Development, and career fairs every semester. The most difficult thing about applying to internships is finding the confidence to actually apply, but as my professor said, you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.
5. What do you hope to do with your degree when you graduate?
My main goal is to make a positive difference, wherever my path may lead me. I’d like to work in the automotive industry, focusing on sustainability and making the roads a safer place, especially since the number of fatal car accidents has been increasing every year. I’m always open to different opportunities but regardless of what I do I always want to place safety and the community at the forefront of my priorities.
6. Are you involved in any activities on campus?
In what capacity
I’m in the Bonner Leader Program at HPU, a fouryear work-study where students each commit to over 300 hours of community service every year at one of the 9 nonprofit organizations that are partnered with HPU. I’ve been at the Community Writing Center, an after school program for 3rd8th graders, for almost 3 years now. I served as my cohort’s representative my freshman and sophomore year and am currently the student government representative for the program, as well as my site’s Site Leader. I’ve had the privilege of working with the Robotics Club to set up an event for MLK day where we made cardboard cars with local kids and taught them about the basics of robotics! I also recruited some of the engineering students to volunteer with me during Engineers Week to lead different engineering activities for the elementary and middle school students from the Community Writing Center.
7. What advice would you like to share with your peers or with future students?
Reach out to your professors and peers whenever you need help. The professors here really want to see you succeed and it’s better to reach out for help than to try to figure things out on your own. It’s also helpful to reach out to your peers or classmates because chances are you aren’t the only one struggling. One last piece of advice is to talk to as many people as you can. Networking is probably one of the most important things you can do for your future, you never know when someone can provide you with an opportunity!
STUDENT SPOTLIGHT
Parker Blue B.S., Computer Science, 2025
1. What are you studying at HPU?
2. Why did you choose HPU?
3. What interests do you have outside of your major?
I was formerly a power lifter and I am still very involved in the gym community on campus. I have always played video games and board games with my friends, but since COVID I picked up ping pong and chess and still play from time to time.
4. What are some of the challenges that you have faced or overcome this semester?
In our capstone, we are learning how to work with a large development team on an even larger project and figuring out how to divide the work and still be interconnected and on time has been an interesting challenge to say the least.
5. What do you hope to do with your degree when you graduate?
I hope to continue my education in grad school and get a PhD in Computer Science, and with that I hope to teach. I have also recently looked into becoming a software developer, inspired by our work on the capstone.
I am studying Computer Science and can get a concentration in Cybersecurity.
I chose HPU because of the wonderful campus and Professors I met with during my visits here. It was always the one that stuck out in my memory of the dozen schools I toured.
In what capacity
6. Are you involved in any activities on campus?
I am a member of the Computer Science Society on campus and have played intramural soccer as a goalie for a couple years. I am also close friends with most members of the power lifting club and the regulars at the gym. I believe I hold the natural bench press record for the school at 425 pounds.
7. What advice would you like to share with your peers or with future students?
My advice would be to get a routine or schedule going ASAP. Being organized and on top of your work allows you to make the most of your free time. My other big piece of advice is to be friendly with your professors. They are here for you as much as your willing to go to them, and building relationships with them goes much further than the classroom.
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