For Immediate Release
October 25, 2011

Three Cañada Students Are the Only Community College Students Chosen to Present at National Technical Conference

The three students will join a former Cañada student in presenting original research at the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers Conference in Anaheim this weekend.

Three current Cañada students and a former student who has transferred to UC San Diego have been chosen to present original research at this weekend's Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers conference in Anaheim. They are the only community college students chosen to present.

"I still can't believe that I am the only community college student who is going to present at the undergrad paper competition," said Esther Chan.  "It is also my first time presenting at a conference so I am very excited."

Chan will be presenting a paper titled "Developing a Temperature and Pressure Datalogger for Biomedical Applications".  The paper is a summary of the research completed by a group of Cañada students who participated in a summer NASA internship. "My group completed research on creating a data logger from a printed circuit board that records pressure and temperature changes due to magnets implanted inside a patient with a hollow chest condition. The magnets gradually pull the sternum outwards to realign with the ribcage, and the data logger is designed to monitor subtle changes within the patient in real time."

Jose Valdovinos is teaming up with former student and current UC San Diego student Andrew Chan to present a poster on their NASA internship. "I was on the civil engineering group at NASA and we were conducting research on steel frames," Valdovinos said. Most modern high-rise buildings and many mid- and low-rise buildings rely on steel moment frames to resist lateral loads arising from winds or earthquakes. "We had to construct a computerized three-story building that could withstand earthquake forces and pass building code requirements."

Fatima Fernandez, a first semester biology student at Cañada, will be presenting research she did at Stanford University last summer. The title of Fernandez's research poster is "The Use of Dextran as an Analog for VEGF Release from Alginate Microspheres in an Effort to Induce Angiogenesis."

The Cañada students will present their research alongside students from Arizona State University, Cal Poly, UCLA, Stanford and other major research universities.

"It's extremely exciting that these were the only community college students from across the nation invited to present at this conference," said Cathy Lipe, the Mathematics, Engineering, Science Achievement (MESA) Program Coordinator at Cañada. The students will receive free conference registration and paid lodging at conference hotel for four nights. "They're also going to get a lot of attention from universities who want to recruit graduate students," Lipe said. "In addition to presenting their research, they are going to be engaged in a full-day Grad Lab that will help them prepare to apply for graduate school when they complete their undergrad degrees."

The conference is the largest Hispanic technical conference in the country. It runs Oct. 26-30 and will feature more than 300 of the top companies in the U.S. along with students and representatives from the top colleges and universities around the nation.

For more information, contact Robert Hood, Director of Marketing and Public Relations, at hoodr@smccd.edu or 306-3340