Natasha Chopp's Profile

While snowboarding in the back-country, avalanches become a potential danger to a snowboard rider. If caught in an avalanche, the rider will be buried and could be lost for hours (leading to the likely possibility of death). Therefore, the SmartBoard will have two different ways to track the individual if they get lost during their riding experience: GPS and REECO location.

Researchers at Michigan Tech's Great Lakes Research Center study all things water - what is in it, what lives in it, and what lies beneath.

Our team will be focusing on improving the community and quality of life in Ghana and Tanzania. Our biggest focus will be improving the education system in both locations while providing the communities with the necessary resources.

The current pandemic has severely disrupted the supply of PPE creating shortages and rationing of materials on the front lines of our community response. To address this problem, the open source community and Michigan Tech are stepping in to develop, manufacture, and supply PPE. Help us alleviate this shortage!

The Astro-Huskies Team are participating in the NASA Lunabotics Competition in person at the Kennedy Space Center for the third time in-person. The competition requires designing, building, testing, and competing an autonomous construction robot that can travel through an obstacle area. Please help support our project today!

The Astro-Huskies Team are participating in the NASA Lunabotics Competition in person at Kennedy Space Center for the fourth time in-person. The competition requires designing, building, testing, and competing with an autonomous construction robot that can traverse through an obstacle zone, excavate, and construct a berm. Please help support our project today!

John Hammond Forest Wheeler was a student in the School of Forest Resources and Environmental Science when he was tragically killed in a car accident on November 23, 2016. John was smart, hard-working and passionate about forestry and natural resources. This project will establish a fund in John's memory that will support outreach efforts to high school students about natural resource careers.

SARS-CoV-2, the causative agent of COVID-19, has infected more than 27 million people worldwide. Given the number of patients who need to be tested, it has become very difficult to obtain viral transport medium (VTM), which is used for preservation of the specimens during transportation and/or storage at a testing facility. Help us by contributing to this project so that we can prepare more VTM for testing.

During the COVID-19 pandemic it is critical for adults to “move more” and “sit less” because regular physical activity promotes good health, bolsters immune function, and potentially improves prognosis with COVID-19 infection. We will “KEEP THE UP MOVING” by offering a free virtual community-based physical activity program.

Help us share the excitement of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) with students from across the country in grades four through twelve. The Mind Trekkers STEM roadshow travels to schools and science festivals, inviting students to engage with our exciting, hands-on demonstrations—all facilitated by current Michigan Tech students.

Michigan Tech students will engage in a service learning project by knitting for the homeless in Technical Communication classes. Apart from creating handmade projects for people who currently do not have a home, students will also create documents and thus raise social awareness and help the StreetKnits community grow. In 2014, StreetKnits donated 57 projects. In 2015, 185 projects were donated.

Ecotourism could be a tool to promote women’s empowerment. Especially with its attention to social justice, encouragement, promoting participation and empowerment of local people, including women. However, little attention is currently devoted to women’s participation in ecotourism. The purpose of this research is to understand the processes through which ecotourism empowers or disempowers women.

Due to increasingly strict fuel standards and the need to reduce the United States’ dependency on oil, the auto industry must develop new methods for increasing fuel mileage in their fleets.Michigan Technological University's Supermileage team is rising to the challenge by developing vehicles that push efficiency to the extreme. Imagine traveling from New York to Miami in a little over one gallon of gasoline.

Oftentimes, in non-centralized regions of third world countries, the people present at the birth of a child have neither the training nor the equipment necessary to determine whether a non-responsive infant is living or stillborn. Students in the International Business Ventures Enterprise at Michigan Technological University are working together to solve this problem.

This project will raise awareness for Michigan Tech's Electrical and Computer Engineering department. Target groups are middle/high school students and women; the latter of which is under-represented in Engineering in general. Raising awareness increases the number of potential students and will help to diminish the gender gap in STEM fields, both at Michigan Tech and in the overall engineering industry.

Current snow groomers are not versatile for the varying snow conditions throughout the winter biking season. The snow groomer that will be designed by the Velovations Enterprise will allow trail organizations to groom trails in any snow condition.

While snowboarding in the back-country, avalanches become a potential danger to a snowboard rider. If caught in an avalanche, the rider will be buried and could be lost for hours (leading to the likely possibility of death). Therefore, the SmartBoard will have two different ways to track the individual if they get lost during their riding experience: GPS and REECO location.

The main problem with current home automation solutions is that they are platform-dependent and they cannot integrate with traditional devices. Our main mission is to design a system that could integrate with smart and traditional devices.

In the digital age many find it difficult to play role-playing tabletop games at a physical table. Instead they use environments such as Roll20 or they meet using Discord or Skype. These services can still be lacking and usually make it difficult to visualize battles or scenery. This project would develop a robust 3D environment with integrated Dungeon Mastering tools to make games run smoothly.

Safety flags are used to indicate the current status of the water on that particular coast. The flag indicators alert beach-goers on what water conditions to expect. The flags are changed manually by personnel. Our solution is to use data from the National Weather Service and automatically change the flags as the weather changes. -Photo Credit to the Minnesota Sea Grant

1 in every 1000 people is deaf below 18 years of age. To put in perspective, 300 thousand people just in US are deaf below voting age. Closed captioning in various form is the current solution only alleviating the problem. The key to solving this problem completely is by visual illustration. Vakya is essentially an audio to visual translator designed to save dependents from social stigma.

MINE is a student-led program that is designed to teach the engineering process for future challenges in the mining industry. Space mining is an upcoming industry within engineering fields that in the next 20 years will become a multi-trillion dollar industry. In the program, we are building an autonomous Earth-based rover that will be able to test and carry a payload on Mars.

Here in the Keweenaw, we know winter all too well. But, we don't allow winter weather to define our lives, we instead find ways to overcome cold temperatures and conquer massive amounts of snowfall.

We aim to cultivate vegetables with data-driven, climate-controlled, indoor vertical farming methods.
We challenge the traditional growing seasons and supply chains to ensure the delivery of fresh produce at a commercial scale throughout the year grown in a neighborhood near you.
https://www.yooperag.com/

Support scholarships for low-to-moderate income, first generation, and students of color to study sustainability in Costa Rica for five weeks while they earn 9 Michigan Tech credits that count towards their degree.

Help tomorrow's engineers design cutting-edge snowmobile technology today. The Clean Snowmobile Challenge pits teams of students from different schools against one another to design the best environmentally friendly snowmobile—presenting concepts for quieter, cleaner, and more efficient vehicles to industry.

The International Business Venture Enterprise (IBV) at Michigan Technological University is a Biomedical Enterprise that focuses on providing solutions for global medical problems. To improve the capabilities and safety of low-cost ventilators, we are designing a simple yet reliable ventilator that can be stockpiled by hospitals.

Computer Science is essential for every 21st century student, yet K-12 teachers have little support for getting up to speed in this field. Our program brings the teaching expertise of Michigan Tech's Computer Science Department to students in the Copper Country, and it nurtures a community of teachers helping one another bring coding experience to their classrooms.

Psychological testing is dominated by expensive proprietary tests that have for the most part been developed using public research money. The licensing costs associated with testing makes access difficult or expensive and prevents access to useful testing where funding is limited or unavailable. Improving accessibility will have a substantial impact on the quality of both new research and current mental health care.