Two students from the IU School of Informatics and Computing—Adetoun Akinmboni and Cade Jacobs—were honored on March 31 at the 2017 IUPUI Top 100 Students awards ceremony.
Adetoun Akinmboni
A junior majoring in informatics with a minor and specialty in business, Adetoun Akinmboni has a truly impressive academic record that is matched only by the many ways she supports and educates her campus community through participation and leadership.
Women in Technology (WIT), Students and Technology in Academia Research and Service (STARS), IUPUI Undergraduate Student Government (USG)—for these groups and more, Adetoun has been a tireless and inspiring member and ambassador.
Originally from Nigeria, Adetoun founded the SOIC (School of Informatics and Computing) International Club, which supports international students through cultural experiences, academic activities, and career opportunities. She is a senator for the IUPUI African Student Association (ASA), where she’s also a dance team leader. She is also a student ambassador for IUPUI and for the IUPUI Office of Student Employment.
For her excellence in academics, she has received many recognitions, including the Stefan S.Davis Regatta Scholarship, the Robert E. Cavanaugh Scholarship, the Health Informatics Scholarship, and the Turner Wright Scholarship.
“While coming to America, my mom told my brother and I that we would be residing in Indiana, so I started researching schools,” she says. “I fell in love with IUPUI because of the diversity and the downtown location.”
The IUPUI campus and the Indianapolis community have been lucky beneficiaries of this love. A high school student mentor through the Informatics Diversity-Enhanced Workforce (iDEW), she regularly works with students at Pike High School in Indianapolis, helping them with projects involving trends in technology such as the Internet of Things. She also volunteers to mentor young girls at local Girl Scouts technology workshops.
Adetoun credits her success to many people at the School of Informatics and Computing. Among those that have helped her along the way are Professor Louie Zhu, Academic Advisor Julie Reagan, Career Specialist Stephanie Marshall, and Diversity Coordinator Vicki Daugherty.
Likewise, faculty and staff credit the success of programs and activities to Adetoun. “Ade is such a joy to work with,” says Daugherty. “She has the successful combination of being thoughtful and determined. Her ability to achieve her goals benefits all of us.”
Cade Jacobs
“I think my education can be summed up entirely in three words: The Shirley Technique,” says Media Arts and Science senior Cade Jacobs, whose remarkable contribution to the field of maxillofacial prosthetics via 3-D sculpting and printing changed the life of patient Shirley Anderson—the technique’s namesake. Anderson’s digitally sculpted mandible represented a breakthrough in the applications of 3-D technology to health care.
When Dr. Travis Bellicchi from the IU School of Dentistry approached School of Informatics and Computing Professor Zebulun Wood to help him create the largest facial prosthetic ever created at a dental school, Wood entrusted his student, Jacobs, with the design and construction of a prosthetic too cumbersome in size to be created by traditional materials and methods.
Since then, Cade has worked with the IU School of Dentistry and the IU School of Medicine on similar projects for approximately 30 patients. Jacobs says his undergraduate experience has been devoted to developing and perfecting the method. “Once I began working and doing research on the adaptation of media arts to patient care, nothing else mattered to me,” Jacobs says.
For these achievements, Cade is the recipient of the highest student research honor on the IUPUI campus—the 2017 Chancellor’s Award for Outstanding Undergraduate Research. “Cade is one of our first students to steer his skills in digital design and 3-D animation toward health care and helping people heal. Currently Cade is refining a patent-pending method he co-created for 3-D printing molds for patients who need prosthetics, burn masks, and radiation bolus,” Wood says. “Cade is an artist, an inventor, and at heart, a researcher.”
A regular on the Dean’s List, a member of the IUPUI Honors Program, and a familiar face in student organizations, Cade has served as chapter president of IUPUI SIGGRAPH, and has volunteered as a student mentor for high school students at Summer Workshops at the School of Informatics and Computing. He traveled to Poland on an IUPUI International Scholarship and volunteered for Your Life Your Story, a Latino high school summer camp, teaching adversity training through digital art.
Cade has already secured employment with Online Resources Inc., where he works as a service engineer doing high-accuracy 3-D laser scanning, photogrammetry, and structured light scanning for reverse engineering and metrology purposes. He is grateful to have landed in a job that he loves. And he credits it all to his experiences here.
“IUPUI is a magical place,” Jacobs says. “Without the university and the School of Informatics and Computing, I would not be half the man I am today.”
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Joanne Lovrinic
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