Mercer University student Wesley Kinney was only a freshman when a professor noticed that he didn’t seem challenged in her sophomore-level engineering class.
“He quickly stood out not just for being ahead academically but because he had such a clever and creative way of thinking through problems,” said Dr. Makhin Thitsa, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering.
She knew bright students needed the right level of challenge to stay engaged, so she invited him to join her lab and get involved in research.
Now a rising senior, Kinney is among three Mercer students awarded this year’s Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship, the nation’s most prestigious scholarship for undergraduates in science, mathematics and engineering. Rising seniors Isabella Phillips and Ainsley Westbrook also received the award.
Kinney, from Peachtree City, is double-majoring in electrical engineering and mathematics. In Dr. Thitsa’s lab, he investigates safety-critical control systems.
“A good example is cruise control in your car. When you set that, your goal is to go, like, 50 miles an hour,” Kinney said. “But what we’re really concerned about is the safety of those systems.”
That’s where adaptive cruise control comes in. With adaptive cruise control, a car will drive at a set speed, unless a vehicle is going slower in front of it. At that point, the controller will adjust the speed, he said.
Kinney’s research goes a step further, Dr. Thitsa said.
“He looks at scenarios where the controller and the system it’s trying to manage are connected through an imperfect communication channel. That means the controller has to make decisions with incomplete or unreliable information, adding a whole new layer of complexity,” she said. “In these kinds of applications, having mathematical safety guarantees for the controller are absolutely essential.”
The research has broad real-world applications — from autonomous driving to implantable medical devices to wireless energy management systems, she said.
Kinney is the only undergraduate student on the research team, which includes collaborators from Mercer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Ferrara in Italy. Dr. Thitsa said Kinney put in the effort to ensure he understood the material.
“He even picked up mathematics as a second major and started giving me weekly presentations on control theory, just to build the foundation he needed,” she said. “Once he had that groundwork in place, he began to see the project in a whole new light, and that’s when he really started to grow into a researcher.”
Kinney said working in the lab has given him a better understanding of high-level problem-solving. His work contributed to a published journal article and was presented last year at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Conference on Decision and Control in Milan.
He said he particularly likes working on the math aspects of the research.
“I really like the theoretical side of stuff, so a lot of projects I do are doing research and not developing the math, per se, but being the first application of the math,” he said. “Going and finding formulas and doing the math work behind the engineering work has been really interesting.”
Kinney is a Stamps Scholar, in the Engineering Honors Program, and a member of Tau Beta Pi engineering honor society and Beta Upsilon Chi fraternity. After graduation, he plans to earn a master’s degree and Ph.D. in engineering.
He said his experience at Mercer has been amazing.
“I’m definitely glad that I ended up at Mercer. I think it was the best option for me,” he said. “I’ve had a great time academically. I’ve had amazing options that I wouldn’t have probably had at any other school. Dr. Thitsa found me pretty early while I was here and got me on a really good track.”
