February 6, 2013
St. Mary’s University President Thomas Mengler describes St. Mary’s University as a gateway to successful careers, and senior Omar Magana is a prime example of this transformative process.
Magana, who’s studying Electrical Engineering and Physics, worked this past summer as a student engineer at the Space & Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR) in San Diego. During his time there, he executed an autonomous 2D soccer simulation in order to analyze the different pathways for sensor data acquisition and time latency between each player.
He also worked with another Navy research group in Monterey, Calif., where he assisted in the programming and troubleshooting of an AUV workbench 3D interface utility.
In summer 2011, he was a student researcher at the Nuclear Physics Laboratory at the University of Notre Dame, where he studied the half-life of the element Fe-60. Also in 2011, he was a student analyst in the Research and Imaging Department of the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio (UTHSCSA). There he studied patients with bipolar disorder and variations of gray matter in the cerebral cortex.