Student Profile: Arturo Rodriguez, Mechanical Engineering
LUCERO FIERRO | October 16, 2018
Arturo Rodriguez serves as evidence that setting personal goals can translate to success. The sophomore mechanical engineering major at The University of Texas at El Paso has enjoyed several fruitful accomplishments, including a current role as an officer for the American Society of Mechanical Engineering UTEP chapter.
A native of El Paso, Rodriguez spent most of his childhood in Juárez, Mexico. He grew up passionate about physics and mathematics and its applications, which made him pursue a career in mechanical engineering.
“I wanted to understand all about applied physics and the applications math has at different levels such as its control regions and geometrics,” Rodriguez said.
Rodriguez has thrived in his academic pursuits. He has been named to the dean’s list six times since he arrived at UTEP in Fall 2015. He also successfully finished an internship at one of the U.S. Department of Energy Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, this summer, where he performed computational fluid dynamics simulations. As an undergraduate student researcher at UTEP, Rodriguez predicted the behavior of the flow for light beam propagation through a long-path air medium, porous media simulation with uncertainty quantification and image processing integration for predicting oil stored at sedimentary formations. His mentor, Vinod Kumar, Ph.D., associate professor of mechanical engineering, said Rodriguez has proven to have the required skills for next-generation research projects.
“Arturo has gone beyond my expectations,” Kumar said. “He has been an exceptional student and I believe that he is capable of making significant contributions to the scientific communities and is certainly on the track of publishing more manuscripts including peer-reviewed international journals and more conference proceedings.”
With two research papers published in the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) Fluid Engineering Summer Division Conference in Montreal, Canada, and companies already interested in hiring him, Rodriguez had the opportunity to present findings on the mechanical learning approach to predict the flow rate for an immiscible two-phase flow at a pore scale for enhanced oil recovery applications as well as on the utilization of machine learning to predict the surface tension of metals and alloys.
“We are very proud of Arturo’s accomplishments,” said Benjamin Flores, Ph.D., associate dean for academic affairs and undergraduate studies for the College of Engineering. “He has been on the dean’s list multiple times. Not only is he talented, but he’s clearly taking advantage of opportunities the College of Engineering has to offer. In particular, as an undergraduate researcher and an intern at a national laboratory, he is participating in high impact activities that will prepare him for Graduate School. He is definitely a role model to follow.”
Rodriguez plans to graduate in Spring 2020. He hopes to pursue a doctorate in mechanical engineering and would like to attend The University of Texas at Austin or Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.