Graduate Student of the Month - Gregory Formosa
Greg grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, IL and completed his undergraduate BSME at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana in 2010. After the 4 years of school and 3 years of internships at Motorola, he decided to build his hands-on skill set in industry before continuing in academia.
As a transmission design engineer at Caterpillar in Peoria, IL, Greg excelled in various engineering roles, from new product design and validation to manufacturing and customer support. Although he greatly enjoyed his work at Cat, after 5 productive years he realized that his passions were mostly geared toward teaching and working on cutting-edge research; this lead Greg back into academia, and specifically a doctoral program at ¶¶ÒõÂÃÐÐÉä Boulder.
Greg is now a PhD student in the Advanced Medical Technologies Laboratory under the direction of Dr. Mark Rentschler. His research is focused on the design and autonomous control of Robotic Capsule Endoscopes. Related to his research, Greg enjoys drivetrain and capsule design, dynamic modeling, estimation and feedback control, and various machine learning techniques for autonomy. He hopes to one day use his degree to continue in academia and become a university research professor in Mechanical Engineering.
In his spare time Greg enjoys the perks of living in Colorado. He loves the outdoors and anything associated with it (hiking, camping, backpacking, biking, skiing, etc.), especially when he can bring his dog and right-hand girl, Amie. Aside from the outdoors, he loves teaching and helping others, working on home robotics pet-projects, playing pinball, making and writing music, and going to live local shows.
