Lending a helping hand: Tom Zajdel

Posted: 

More than 100 electrical and computer engineering undergraduate students will be among the 10,400 who will earn degrees – the largest spring quarter graduating class ever – during the final quarter commencement exercises at Ohio State on Sunday, June 10, 2012. Some ECE graduates will continue their education, while others will enter the workforce. Each of these students has a unique story; join us as we highlight a few of them over the next week.

zajdel_tom2_edited.jpg
Tom Zajdel

Not one to sit on the sidelines, Tom Zajdel has taken advantage of a wide variety of opportunities offered at Ohio State during his education.  

“I got to try a lot of different things here at OSU: being a teaching assistant, tutoring students in ECE, researching radio wave scattering at the ElectroScience Lab, and conducting perceptual experiments with cochlear implant patients,” says Zajdel. 

Zajdel also completed two summer internships, one in the diaper industry, with Procter & Gamble: Baby Care, and another in the defense industry at Syracuse Research Corporation.

Zajdel’s interest in helping others has also been evident during his time at Ohio State. He tutored classmates and served as a teaching assistant, helping underclassmen with the Fundamentals of Engineering Robot Competition.

“I really enjoyed the time I spent as a teaching assistant for the First Year Engineering program at OSU. The FEH robot competition that runs every spring is great, because you see freshmen actually doing design work, building and programming autonomous robots.” says Zajdel. “Being a part of the students' support system as they learn how to achieve amazing things was always very rewarding.”

Zajdel is also one of the co-founders of the Electronics Club, an open space that enables any ECE major to work on his/her own independent electronics projects.

“I feel like the best way to become an engineer is to work on your own design projects,” he explains. “The open lab space has really taken on a life of its own, featuring things like holiday lights, microcontrollers, antique radios and vacuum tubes.”

A prolific and successful undergraduate researcher, Zajdel earned the top award in the engineering category at the 2012 Denman Undergraduate Research Forum. His project, Asynchronous Stimulation for Cochlear Implants, attempts to improve the simulation pattern for individuals with a cochlear implant. Zajdel also received a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.

After graduation, Zajdel plans to pursue a PhD in electrical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, researching implantable circuits and systems for brain-machine interfaces. His long-term goal is to become a university faculty member.

“I want to work on projects that help rehabilitate people who have lost some of their nervous system function. I have worked on cochlear implant research the past year, and would like to focus my engineering career on developing other neural prosthetics like retinal implants and advanced prosthetic limbs,” he says. “By studying the interface between the central nervous system and implanted electronics, we can learn many amazing things about how the brain actually works too.”

Related stories: