Jason GibbsBS in EE, Binghamton, 2003
MS in EE, Binghamton, 2004
My name is Jason Gibbs and I attended Binghamton University from 1999 to 2004. I had the privilege of being one of the first two students in the ECE department's 3/2 combined BS/MS program. The other student to graduate with me during the first year of the 3/2 program was my good friend Steven Seiden. We both decided to focus on signal processing, so we had many of the same classes, as well as a common senior design project. Along with a great education at Binghamton, I also made some lasting friendships. I met my fiancée, Danielle Stoll, in Calculus II. The best-man in our wedding, fellow engineering student Tim Brown, was my roommate/housemate for the first four years I was in Binghamton.
While I enjoyed almost every course I took at Binghamton, those taught by two professors really stood out. I took five courses from Professor Mark Fowler, two undergraduate and three graduate. These courses provided me with the solid background and understanding of signal processing required for my current studies. Victor Skormin, distinguished professor of electrical engineering, was a great mentor and also served as my thesis advisor. His controls courses provided the fundamentals for my current studies. Furthermore, he helped me attain summer internships at BAE Systems in Johnson City, N.Y. and at the United States Air Force Research Lab in Rome, N.Y. Through these internships I was able to gain valuable insights into the lives of both industrial and research engineers. Most memorably, though, he arranged for a trip for several ECE students to Prague, Czech Republic, in his efforts to start an exchange program between Binghamton University and the Czech Technical University. The trip was an amazing experience for which I will always be grateful.
After graduation from Binghamton, I moved to State College, Pa., where I am currently pursuing a PhD at Penn State. Presently, I am a student of Professor William Higgins in the Multidimensional Image Processing Lab. The purpose of the lab is to aid in the treatment of lung cancer. Currently, when it is suspected that a patient may have lung cancer, a physician orders a multidimensional computed tomography (MDCT) scan of the patient. Essentially, this scan is a stack of hundreds 0.5mm thick images of the chest, one on top of another, corresponding to slabs of the cross section of the chest. If the physicians notice something bad in the MDCT data, they must biopsy the site. This is accomplished with videobronchoscopes, which are long, flexible cameras that can be navigated through the airway and through which a biopsy needle can be inserted. This is a very hard procedure to do, as the biopsy sites are usually beyond the airway walls, so the physician has a very small target to hit and is aiming at it completely blind. The goal of our lab is to fuse the MDCT data with the video feed so that the physicians can localize their position in three dimensional space. My specific research is to determine the best airways to navigate through to reach distant ROIs. It's exciting to see the software the members of the lab and I have written used in actual bronchoscopic procedures at Penn State's Hershey Medical Center.
I had a great time at Binghamton and learned a lot from my studies in the ECE department.
