Wellesley resident Maddy Weaver has always loved to tinker with anything she could get her hands on. As a child, she enjoyed finding items such as old stereo equipment and vacuum cleaners at the recycling and transfer station to bring home and try to fix. It’s not a surprise that she enjoyed this type of hands-on learning, coming from a long line of engineers in her family. Due to S-POWER partnership she was accepted into transfer and mentor programs. S-POWER provided scholarship money and the information, advice, and projects needed to learn real-world creative engineering skills.
“MassBay has provided me with a path in engineering and with experiences I wouldn’t be able to get at other colleges. I was able to be a teaching assistant for the iCREAT program and showcase my work at the National Science Foundation’s conference in Washington D.C. It was an honor to be selected to show my work alongside other community college students from around the United States and represent MassBay. I also presented my restored floppy disk-driven robot project at the MassBay STEM Expo and met Massachusetts House Speaker, Robert Deleo. As a member of the STEM Mentor Program, my mentor was Yari Golden-Castano, a laser research project manager at MIT Lincoln Laboratory and a top 100 finalist for the Mars One Mission. I also mentored at the Walsh Middle School in Framingham, and was the co-president of the MassBay Engineering Club. I was amazed by the number of opportunities that were afforded to me by participating in events hosted by the school,” said Maddy.
In the summer of 2018, Maddy participated in a Research Experience for Undergrads (REU) in Los Angeles, CA at the University of Southern California’s Mixed Reality Lab. She designed and built a 3D object that was used in a larger project exploring decision-making in a virtual reality context. Maddy was named as a co-author on the Advancing Ethical Decision Making in Virtual Reality project, which won “Best Poster, Honorable Mention” at the annual IEEE VR conference in Japan.
Maddy graduated from MassBay on May 23, 2019, and attended Northeastern University, pursuing a bachelor’s degree in engineering. While at Northeastern, she worked in the engineering lab with Assistant Professor, Alireza Ramezani, contributing to his research of building a bat-like drone, assisting with laser cutting and soldering circuit boards, and programming microchips to control the robot’s motors and communication. Maddy graduated from Northeastern University in May 2022.
Maddy is now in a Master’s program at Carnegie Mellon, doing research in robotics at AiPEX Lab. She created a robotic drone bat and a horse shoe crab robot, giving the robots natural-looking motion for the entertainment industry.
Northeastern University | Student Pathways Opening World Energy Resources (S-POWER) Program, is a scholarship and career mentor program funded by the National Science Foundation. Funding from this grant is used towards scholarships, mentors, career development, and research experience opportunities for students who have an interest in transferring to 4-year institutions and plan to create innovations in sustainable energy.
Join the S-POWER program!
To apply and to find out more, contact MassBay engineering professor Marina Bograd: mbograd@massbay.edu