Our featured student in this issue of IMPACT is Collin Cappelle, a doctoral candidate in UVM’s Complex Systems PhD program. He took a moment out from his busy schedule to give us a brief update on his time at UVM.

COLLIN: I went UVM for my undergraduate studies. While I was an undergraduate, I was a member of the Men's Club Volleyball team and a section editor for the Water Tower (the school's alternative newsmagazine). I graduated with a double-major B.S in Computer Science and B.S. in Mathematics in 2015.

While I was an undergraduate student, I took Dr. Maggie Eppstein's Modeling Complex Systems class and found the Complex Systems Center. This led me to be very interested in the wealth of research happening in Complex Systems at UVM. I then took Dr. Josh Bongard's evolutionary robotics course and he asked me to join his lab (The MEC-Lab) as a PhD student researching modularity in embodied agents.

My graduate school experience has been great, specifically because of the other members of my lab and everyone in the Complex Systems Center. Josh has been a superb advisor, allowing a lot of freedom to explore various lines of research while still being supportive when needed. Grad school has given me the opportunity to travel to Germany and Japan to present my work at conferences in my field. Every faculty member in the Complex Systems Center has been an inspiration, but specifically Josh, Maggie, Dr. Chris Danforth, and Dr. Peter Dodds have had the biggest influence on me personally.

I will be defending my thesis in April 2019, meaning I will graduate in October 2019. In June I will be moving to San Francisco to join my lovely partner Katie Ettman who got her Bachelor's degree at UVM in 2015 and now works at SPUR in San Francisco. I am now looking for post-doctoral and research opportunities in the Bay Area.