Connor McCann Awarded Belle and Carl Morse Scholarship

Cited for “excelling at research” and “novel insights,” Connor McCann ’18 has been awarded the Belle and Carl Morse Scholarship.

The scholarship is awarded to a student in Applied Physics, Chemical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or Mechanical Engineering who has completed his or her junior year and, by outstanding scholarship and participation in extracurricular activities within the department, has demonstrated leadership among fellow students. 

Shortly after arriving to Yale as a freshman, McCann became involved in research in the lab of Aaron Dollar, associate professor of mechanical engineering & materials science.

“Connor is one of those truly rare students who, even as a freshman, had the maturity, intellect and character that make you immediately want to pull them in and get them working on research,” Dollar wrote in his letter of nomination. "He has excellent abilities both in design/fabrication, as well as analysis, and is passionate and committed enough to put in the time and effort require to bring projects to the point of being publishable.”

In the lab, McCann has worked on two major projects. One is a project related to robotic assembly of lattice structures. The lab has published two peer-review papers on the topic, with McCann as second author on both. For the other project, McCann has developed a new type of dexterous robot hand. He has designed and built a prototype and submitted a paper about it to the IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robot Systems, one of the top conferences in the field.