Kultegin Aydin, professor and department head of electrical engineering, and Erica Murphy, electrical engineering student marshal
Murphy named electrical engineering student marshal for spring commencement
04/22/2019
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – Erica Murphy has been named the department of electrical engineering’s student marshal for Penn State’s spring commencement ceremony on May 3.
She has chosen Weihua Guan, assistant professor of electrical engineering, as her faculty escort.
College of Engineering student marshals are selected for their outstanding academic achievement and contributions to engineering student life.
Murphy is a 2015 graduate of Merion Mercy Academy in Merion Station, Pa. While at Penn State, she earned both the Evan Pugh Scholar Award and the President’s Freshman Award. She was also the recipient of several scholarships, including the Lockheed Martin Engineering Scholarship; the Women in Engineering Program 2019 Joelle Leadership Award (first runner-up); the Clifford B. Holt, Jr. Memorial Scholarship in Electrical Engineering; the Penn State Engineering Alumni Society (PSEAS) Endowed Scholarship; and the Paul Morrow Endowed Scholarship in the College of Engineering.
As a Schreyer Honors College student, Murphy conducted research for her honors thesis, “Microfluidic Time-Division Multiple Access Resistive Pulse Sensor for Particle Analysis,” in the Biomedical Sensing Systems laboratory. There, she developed the hardware and software for a multi-channel cell counting device. The ultimate goal of the research was to scale a laboratory-based technology (for cell counting and disease diagnosis) onto a portable device for use in remote areas.
“As a freshman, I originally thought I’d go into biomedical or biochemical engineering, but I soon found my passion in electrical engineering,” said Murphy. “I love that my research allows me to apply electrical engineering principles—from circuit board design to digital signal processing—to advance biomedical technology.”
She held two internships and one co-op position during her time as a Penn State student. She first worked as a control systems engineering intern for GE Transportation, where she developed an audio alarm application for the train control system and wrote code to analyze GPS data. She next worked at ExxonMobil in their instrumentation engineering co-op, where she programmed programmable logic controllers (PLCs) implement safety shutdowns in their petrochemical plant and mitigate cybersecurity threats. Most recently, she was an electronics design intern at Boeing: Defense, Space & Security.
Over the past four years, Murphy was involved in numerous extracurricular clubs and activities, including her involvement with the Women in Engineering Program Orientation as both a mentor for 2017 and as the overall lead in 2018. She also served as an engineering ambassador for the College of Engineering from 2017 through 2019 and as the outreach chair for the Penn State student chapter of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers for the 2018-2019 academic year. In 2016-2017, Murphy was an academic facilitator for the Women in Engineering program. In addition to her many scholastic extracurriculars and her rigorous coursework, Murphy also participated in intramural floor hockey in 2019.
After graduation, Murphy will work for Boeing as an electrical engineer in their Engineering Career Foundation Program.