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also in Mechanical Engineering. He currently teaches first-year engineering courses as well as various courses in Mechanical Engineering, primarily in the mechanics area. His pedagogical research areas include standards-based assessment and curriculum design, including the incorporation of entrepreneurial thinking into the engineering curriculum and especially as pertains to First-Year Engineering.

Dame. Research interests include education, controls, robotics, and information processing. Prior to teaching, he ran a small consulting and R&D company and served as proposal engineering supervisor for GROB Systems, Inc.

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The authors' institution, Ohio Northern University (ONU) is a private, medium-sized university offering undergraduate degrees in Arts & Sciences, Business, Pharmacy, and Engineering, as well as graduate degrees in Law. The College of Engineering at ONU attracts exceptional students. However, because there are no graduate programs within the College of Engineering, engineering students have limited opportunities to participate in advanced interdisciplinary research. This paper describes research activities conducted primarily in the mechanical engineering department by undergraduate students. Projects in biomechanics and biomaterials integrate engineering mechanics and materials science with the life sciences to enable undergraduate engineering students to participate in cutting-edge research. These activities are expected to attract more students, especially female students, to engineering and to expand the future career options of mechanical engineering students. There are a number of special circumstances that must be considered when developing research projects that are appropriate for undergraduate students. The undergraduate research activities are carefully designed to recruit suitable students and to ensure a positive educational experience. During the freshman year, students are selected and introduced to the research topic. These students enroll in an independent-study course in order to learn basic concepts related to future research work. In the sophomore year, the participating students obtain practical experience in mechanics experiments. During the junior year, the students perform mechanics analysis and more advanced experiments. In the senior year, the students create numerical models using finite element analysis. All the students involved in the research work have good academic standing. These students become more interested in cutting-edge research work and some of them decide to pursue graduate degrees after graduation.