STORY: Olin College’s Undergraduate Research and Hands-on Learning on Display at 2025 AAAS Annual Meeting

February 24, 2025

A delegation of Olin students and two faculty presented their research at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual Meeting, held in Boston from February 13-15, 2025.

More than 4,000 attendees from 65 countries attend the AAAS meeting each year, where members of the scientific community attend a range of talks, workshops, poster presentations and more.

Georgia Van de Zande, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, mentored two students on two research projects, and Victoria Dean, assistant professor of computer science, guided a group of seven students. Results of the poster competition will be announced on Thursday, Feb 27.

Olin President Dr. Gilda A. Barabino is a past president, immediate past board chair and a long-time fellow of AAAS, where she sought to collaboratively build a strong and impactful AAAS and to guide the organization as a change agent while pursuing an evidence-based and actionable agenda.

“I commend our students and faculty for their outstanding research presentations and for how well they represented Olin College on this national stage,” said President Barabino. “The American Association for the Advancement of Science is a powerful organization and leader in the scientific community. Olin’s engagement with the opportunities and connections it offers is of tremendous benefit to our students, faculty and staff as we continue to innovate and pursue equitable solutions to today’s engineering challenges.”

Olin also hosted a booth at the conference to further showcase the College’s undergraduate research and design projects. Visitors were able to build their own hoppers, speak to current students, faculty and staff, and learn more about Olin’s unique engineering curriculum.

A highlight of the booth was Olin’s Hopper activity, inspired by a cornerstone design project from first-year course Design Nature. For this project each fall, Olin first-year students learn about engineering design processes, spend time sketching and prototyping, and finally, build Hoppers—devices modeled after jumping animals and insects.

Cultivating Change: Designing Solutions for Reduced-Till Agriculture in New England

Peter Sapiro-Mitten ’27, advised by Assistant Professor Georgia Van de Zande, studied a farming approach called reduced-till organic agriculture (RTOA) that merges the benefits of no-till and organic farming to improve soil health while minimizing artificial inputs. Despite its benefits, the lack of suitable commercial-scale equipment poses a challenge to its adoption. To address this, Sapiro-Mitten’s research built a network of ten small to medium-scale farmers practicing or interested in RTOA, conducting interviews, farm visits, and discussions to understand their needs.

Findings revealed that farmers rely heavily on hand tools due to cost and concerns over soil compaction, though this becomes impractical at larger scales, and outlines the initial stages of co-designing such tools with farmers. By developing innovative equipment, this project aims to facilitate the broader adoption of RTOA, supporting the United Nations' goal of sustainable agriculture.

“I've been working on this research for over a year now and started with a literature study,” said Sapiro-Mitten. “Then we did a lot of really intense research over the summer, going out to different farmers and interviewing them and building connections and gathering data. The actual presentation itself involved creating a poster of our findings, some in an abstract, and then many hours of practicing what I was going to say and rehearsing my speech case.”

“The combination of these two is still relatively new in research, so we're trying to call attention to that and bring more academic research but also invite corporations to help and build equipment for it. "

Analyzing Engineering Design Teams’ Internal Communication Regarding User Interaction

This research by Ahan Trivedi ’27 studied the internal communications of engineering design teams (EDTs) to understand how the quantity and quality of stronger and weaker EDTs internal communications differed. Ahan was advised by Assistant Professor Georgia Van de Zande.

To understand how design teams communicated about their users, this study analyzed a database of 49,496 Slack messages sent by 32 design teams pulled from a senior year core product design course from 2016 to 2019. This study concludes that Strong EDTs internally communicate about their users more frequently than Weak EDTs, user communication peaks during periods of ideation convergence, and Strong teams prioritize language centered around user-needs while Weak teams focus on task-oriented terminology. Findings from this study can help EDT managers identify opportunities for instruction, intervention, and incentive to encourage more effective user engagements on design teams.

Linguistic Bias in Automatic Speech Recognition for People Who Stutter

The third poster, created by Sreesanth Adelli ’28, Troy Anderson ’28, Anna Du ’28, Dongim Lee ’27, Anika Mahesh ’28, Xavier Nishikawa ’28, and Kenneth Xiong ’27, and presented by Lee, examined how voice technology can be made more accessible for everyone. The ASR team was advised by Assistant Professor Victoria Dean.

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) models often struggle to understand people who stutter (PWS), making everyday technology less accessible for 80 million PWS. Our research focuses on improving these models by fine-tuning them to better recognize stuttered speech in English and Mandarin. By reducing the error rates by 14.2% in English and 47.4% in Mandarin, our work takes a major step toward more inclusive AI.

“It was really nice to be here as a student and as a poster presenter,” said Lee. “It was also great to attend all the workshops about science and technology and their impact on the world so I could broaden my horizons and perspective of how I can work as an engineer and technician to improve this world and for people.”