ECE Student Leads Brain Activity Tracking Capstone Project
Rikit Makhija leads Team 24018 in understanding the aging brain
It’s crunch time for seniors taking part in the Craig M. Berge Engineering Design Program. Nearly 100 teams are fixing bugs, repairing equipment, and making tweaks as they finalize their projects in preparation for judging and display at Craig M. Berge Engineering Design Day on April 29.
Don McDonald, the faculty mentor for Team 24018, explained that the idea is to record brain activity.
This year, McDonald is in his second year of sponsorship, backing a project to help researchers understand the aging brain, which he is also mentoring.
“Brains age and develop problems at different rates,” he said. “The idea is to study the brain under a vast variety of circumstances.”
Team 24018 is improving a tether system used to track rat movements and record neural data as the rats move through a space and see visual stimuli, as well as redesigning and building a new robotic device that is part of the research.
Rikit Makhija, an electrical and computer engineering major who is the project lead, said that McDonald’s counsel throughout the project has been very helpful.
“He is guiding us to answers and products that are available that we would not know about otherwise,” Makhija said. “He is also giving us a sense of what the real world of engineering will be like once we leave here, which is very valuable.”