May 8, 2020

CASTLE congratulates Mi Thant Mon Soe for receiving the 2020 College of Engineering Award for Outstanding PhD Student. Thant is an active member of the CASTLE community and has participated in several CASTLE initiatives including PROFESS, Drexel CIRTL, and serving as an ExPERTS Fellow. 

Thant is a Mechanical Engineering PhD candidate designing microfluidic chips for sorting different human and bacteria cells for her PhD thesis. She has mentored high schoolers, undergraduates and graduates students in the Lab-on-a-chip and BIOMEMS lab. She has a graduate minor in Undergraduate STEM Education and is involved in many West Philadelphia K-12 outreach programs such as Drexel’s Research Sprints Summer Camp and FirstHand initiative by the University City Science Center. As an Experiential Practices in Education Research and Teaching in STEM (ExPERTS) Fellow, she created, taught and presented on numerous modules for high school engineering curriculum and rubrics to monitor students’ practice of the engineering design process. As the President of the American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE) Drexel Students Chapter, she mapped currently available Virtual Reality education programs to the courses offered to the undergraduate students so that students make best use of the university library’s Data Visualization Resources. She is also involved in the Strategic Planning Committee for College of Engineering with a focus on the curriculum and students’ experience. Thant hopes to contribute to the STEM fields by increasing opportunities in STEM for underrepresented minorities not just in USA, but also in developing countries.