Senior Ruslan Kurdyumov, a double major in mechanical engineering and business economics management and two-year member of the basketball team, is headed to the Stanford Mechanical Engineering graduate program. He will continue his work with robotics and controls as part of the masters curriculum that eventually leads to the Ph.D program.Kurdyumov, who was recently recognized as Academic All-Conference and who was named to the NABC Honors Court in 2009, spent last summer designing a sampling system for the AXEL rover at JPL. Axel is a minimalist tethered rover designed for accessing extreme planetary terrain. This is useful because current rovers can't sample from scientifically interesting locations, such as the sides of crater walls.
