• Undergraduate research is a great way to enrich students, prepare them for technical or academic careers, and provide them with outlets for creativity.

• Since research projects are crucial to completing a student's education, at Lamar I have supervised several research projects of undergraduate students.

• In all these projects, my main goal is to actually produce a research paper instead of just a meaningless poster.

• Below I list the main projects I have directed, in reversed chronological order.

Since Fall 2012, I have been working on the characterization of the lateral retention force on liquid drops sliding on surfaces.

So far, ten undergraduate students have participated in this project: Jason Dark, Fabian Garza, Alek Hutson, Huy Luong, Thomas Michael, Jared Richards, Anthony Simental, Jonathan Taylor, Ben Vizena, and Taylor Whitehead.

So far, we have published one paper,

R. de la Madrid, T. Whitehead, and G. Irwin, Am. J. Phs. 83 (2015) 531-538; arXiv:1505.04104

Taylor Whitehead is one of only three Lamar undergraduate students who have co-authored an article that appears in a peer-reviewed journal.

In Summer 2012, I supervised a group of eight undergraduate students who flew in NASA's ``Reduced Gravity Student Flight Opportunities Program.''

We were one of the only 14 projects selected for the 2012 campaign.

Eight undergraduate students participated in the project: Nicholas Allen, Aleiya Samad, Jacob Wright, Jessica Plaia, Kirk Goza, Zachery Jones, Alejandro Gonzalez, and Aaron Weatherford.

In this experiment, the students measured the effect of gravity on the dispersion of a torsional wave machine for 0-g and for 1.8-g.

Eventually, we published a paper on this subject with an undergraduate student (Alejandro Gonzalez):

R. de la Madrid, A. Gonzalez, and G. Irwin, Am. J. Phs. 82 (2014) 1134-1141; arXiv:1409.0426

Alejandro Gonzalez was the second ever Lamar undergraduate physics student to co-author an article published in a peer-reviewed journal.

We built a small prototype with a range of about one meter. However, due to safety concerns, we didn't build the full-scale model.

Eight undergraduate students participated in this project: Jacob Wright, Jessica Plaia, Kirk Goza, Zachery Jones, Alejandro Gonzalez, Aaron Weatherford, Paul Rizk, and Anthony Simental.