Momentum - The Magazine for Virginia Tech Mechanical Engineering Vol. 3 No. 2 Summer 2018 | Page 32

STORY & PHOTO BY ROSAIRE BUSHEY
MECHANICAL ENGINEERING
ME and music double
major Bass earns
National Science
Foundation Graduate
Research Fellowship
Award is first in a decade for
mechanical engineering
For graduate students, a National Science
Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship is
a rare thing with only 2,000 students nation-
wide receiving the award this year, including
Lindsey Bass, a first year graduate student in
mechanical engineering working in the lab of
Christopher Williams, associate professor and
John R. Jones III Faculty Fellow.
The NSF graduate fellowships only allow
graduate students to apply once and Williams,
who received an Honorable Mention for the
award as a graduate student, said Bass is the
first mechanical engineering student from
Virginia Tech to receive the recognition since
2007.
“Lindsey’s been a phenomenal student and
researcher since her undergraduate days,”
Williams said. “She published her first journal
article as a junior and it’s terrific to see her
receive this well-deserved recognition.”
Bass is a native of Pasadena, Maryland.
She graduated in 2017 as double major in
mechanical engineering and music (vocal
performance) and her young resume is a
rarity, bringing together a classically trained
singer with a mechanical engineer currently
researching the additive manufacturing of
MOMENTUM
SUMMER 2018
individual human hearts for use by surgeons
as pre- and post-surgery aids.
“Part of the reason I came to Virginia Tech
was the flexibility of the department,” Bass
said. “When I said I wanted to double major,
the advisors were willing to work with me
and that was great.”
It took five years to earn her degrees, but
Bass spent a semester in Switzerland as part
of the Presidential Global Scholars Program
through the Honors College, and came back to
Blacksburg with a broader cultural experience,
and a desire to be involved in research.
“After my first year I received an internship
from the National Institute of Standards and
Technology and was really fortunate the
project involved additive manufacturing,” Bass
said. “As a first-year student I wasn’t expecting
to jump into a cool engineering internship – I
was expecting to you know, push a button
and record data, but NIST allowed me to
work one-on-one with an expert researcher
who was invested in teaching and showing
me the cool things about research and science
in general. It didn’t matter that I had limited
MATLAB and Labview experience – I used
those skills there and fostered them.
“While I picked mechanical engineering be-
cause I liked math and science, I didn’t know
at the time what I specifically wanted to do.
The NIST internship in additive manufactur-
ing was creative and I thought maybe I should
explore it further. I saw a senior technical
elective for a rapid prototyping additive man-
ufacturing class that Doctor Williams taught
and went to him the fall semester before my
sophomore year started and asked if I could
get into the class, and he said yes so I took it in
the fall.”
Bass took her semester abroad in the spring
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