Summer Research Scholar Wins Young Engineer Award

Benjamin Mueller

Benjamin Mueller, a junior at Great Neck North High School who worked in Professor Nikhil Gupta’s mechanical engineering laboratory last summer, recently won the Herbert Hoover Young Engineer Award for his project titled, Development of a Novel Functionally Gradient Composite Material with High Damage Tolerance.”

Benjamin was one of three high school students working in Professor Gupta’s lab through Polytechnic’s Summer Research Institute in 2006. The Herbert Hoover Young Engineer Award was presented to Benjamin for his outstanding engineering project at the Long Island Science and Engineering Fair on March 22, 2007. The project was based upon his research conducted at Poly which focused on characterizing the functionally gradient composites based on wall thickness gradient and comparing their properties with functionally graded materials based on volume fraction approach. Benjamin will be a co-author in a manuscript that Professor Gupta’s team is publishing. The promising young engineer looks forward to competing in future competitions.