Two College of Engineering alumni made the Iowa State Alumni Association’s list of 2014 Iowa STATEment Makers. Aaron Becker graduated with a degree in electrical and computer engineering in 2005 and is now working to apply swarming micro-robot technology to medical MRI scanners. Matt England, 2011 aerospace engineering grad, travels the western U.S. as a test engineer on the 787 Dreamliner for the Boeing Company.
Becker earned his master’s degree and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The technology he works with as a postdoctoral research fellow in pediatric cardiac bioengineering at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School could have big implications for cancer patients in the future.
Along with fellow researchers, Becker has presented games on the website SwarmControl.net that are designed to collect information about how humans control robotic swarms. In the future, this work could enable surgeons to eliminate cancer at the cellular level. Becker hopes to build a robotics research lab and continue his work in the field of robotics.
On the other side of the country, England studies flight maneuvers such as stalls, high-banked turns and roller coasters on multimillion-dollar aircrafts. Though he was ready to start his life in the Midwest after college, his work has taken him from Alaska to Hawaii and many places in between.
Though he spends a majority of his time thousands of miles off the ground, he still maintains a relationship with Iowa State as the president of the ISU Alumni Association Club of Seattle.
See the full list of 2014 STATEment Makers here.