Luis Felipe Jimenez

Felipe is an undergraduate student at Kean University, majoring in Computer Science. He came to USA in 2005 from Colombia.

In summer 2011, Luis became a Ronald E. McNair Scholar. The McNair Program (www.kean.edu/~mcnair) promotes academic excellence by preparing low-income, first generation, and traditionally underrepresented students for doctoral studies. As a McNair scholar on summer of 2010 he had the opportunity to have his first experience doing research; his first research was called “Assessment of Computational Thinking Knowledge and tools Among High School Teachers” He developed questions for mathematics, science, and computer science teachers attending a professional development workshop at Kean University. Furthermore, he analyzed the teacher's responses to those questions. This data is contributing to a larger study on the tools used by high school teachers to teach computational thinking to their students. He conducted this research under his advisor Dr. Patricia Morreale, chairperson of the Department of Computer Science at Kean University. This work was published as followed, “Measuring the Impact of Computational Thinking Workshops on High School Teachers”.

In 2011, during the scholar year 2011 – 2012, Luis was a member of the Collaborative Research Experience for Undergraduates (CREU) research team funded by the CRA-W from this research a research paper was published, “Attracting High School Students to Computing: A Case Study with Drag-Drop Interfaces” in the ED Media conference. Which obtained the First Place Best Research Paper Award, as well as the First Place Best Undergraduate Research Project Award according to the Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society. As well, Luis presented a poster of the research project in April 2011, during the Research Day at Kean University.

In 2011, Luis was awarded with the National Science Foundation (NSF) Computer Science Scholarship with a total of $8,500.00 per year for a period of three years. This scholarship was given to potential Computer Science students at Kean University.

In summer 2012, Felipe got accepted to the Distributed Research Experience for Undergraduates (DREU) summer research program at Clemson University in the Human Centered Computing Lab. During his summer research program, he worked in several projects such as Brain Computer Interface (BCI).

In summer 2013 Luis got accepted again to the Distributed Research Experience for Undergraduates (DREU) summer research program. This time he had the opportunity to work under the supervision of Dr. Ricardo Gutierrez-Osuna at Texas A&M University, where he conducted research studies on a Human Computer Interaction project. The study intended to use a cell phone camera to extract heart rate and breathing rate from the index finger in a non-invasive way without the need of any external sensor.

Luis has succeeded in the extra curricular activities as well. He is the President of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Kean University Chapter. Also, he was a member for two years of the Club Colombia at Kean University. He has several hobbies, where one of them is photography. As well, on his free time he likes to go backpacking or hiking with his friends. He is a nature and technology lover. For more professional information about me Click here or Contact me at: jimluis@kean.edu