User:Rwd7

Reid D'Amico

Basic Information

Reid D'Amico is a current Freshman at Duke University and is planning on studying Biomedical Engineering. Reid was born in Maryland but spent the majority of his life growing up in sunny Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. Before college, Reid was involved with many different extracurricular:

Reid was a finalist at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair for four years. He received awards ranging from the state to the international level. Before college, Reid developed a way to harness the electrical energy given off by the interaction between plants and bacteria in the soil (See Microbial Fuel Cells [1]). In his Junior year, Reid also developed a Hydroelectric Turbine that harnessed the energy of the fluctuating tides off of the low country of South Carolina.

Reid also spent his time in high school involved with Student Government. Reid was the president of his Freshman and Sophomore classes, Vice President of the Body and ended his high school career as President of the Student Body.

While not involved with the above activities, Reid likes to play tennis, eat, sleep, and hang out with friends and family.

How To Pronounce His Name

Reid is pronounced just as the verb read. For example: "Go read a book" and "Go Reid a book" have sound the same. D'Amico is a little more complicated. For pronunciation purposes, the apostrophe should be overlooked when trying to pronounce his name. "D'A" is pronounced as "Duh", "mi" is pronounced as "me" and "co" is pronounced with a hard "c" and a strong "o" as in Copenhagen.

Engineering Grand Challenge

Reverse Engineering the brain is one of the Engineering Grand Challenges. As a prospective Biomedical Engineer, this topic was the most interesting to me and would be fascinating to study in further detail. A link to learn more is as follows: [2], Roberta Friedman, PhD, Biomedical Computation Review, Spring 2009, September 19, 2011 (Reverse Engineering the Brain).

MATLAB Demonstrations

My favorite MATLAB demonstration was the one titled Loma Prieta Earthquake. Not only was it interesting to see the seismographs in MATLAB, but it is also noted that my first earthquake was experienced during my move-in day on August 23.