On a 100-degree day last July, most people in Claremont were trying to beat the heat. Allison Hutchings '07, however, was on her way to start a fire.

Working with a team of fellow HMC students, the engineering major was in the midst of a project to track the stability of buildings under stress. The team built a plywood structure at the Los Angeles County Fire Department training facility, attached sensors, and used weed-killer torches to start a blaze.

“The biggest advance in our fire research has been the introduction of a new low-cost device that helps measure building vibrations,” explains Hutchings, who balances her academics and research with responsibilities as co-captain of the Claremont-Mudd-Scripps soccer team and proctor for the North Hall dormitory. “Our experiments have focused on burning buildings, but we hope this will be applicable in other situations.”

Besides the fire-starting venture, Hutchings and her civil engineering team worked with De Pietro Fellows and HMC civil engineering professor Ziyad “Zee” Duron on two additional projects: an attempt to create a numerical model of the Folsom Dam, and preliminary work on developing a sensor that mimics the sense of human touch. The sensor is part of a larger government-funded project to create a neurally controlled prosthetic, says Hutchings.

“We’re the only undergraduate school involved in the research,” she adds. “We’ve spent a lot of time brainstorming and working with Quantum Tunneling Composite, a new touch-sensitive composite material. It’s been a wonderful experience.”