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Upward Bound Leads to an X-Force Fellowship

April 12, 2021

Eielson Iceman Spark
Honors students Paige Ripley and Lindy Guernsey joined personnel on Eielson Air Force Base in February 2021. Photo courtesy of Eielson Air Force Base Public Affairs.

"[While] bored in a study hall at Seward High School, an intriguing box of parts piqued my interest,” said Lindy Guernsey, a first year Honors student at UAF.

Guernsey and her friend and fellow student Akilena Veach were part of the Upward Bound College Bound program — a STEM program of the U.S. Department of Education — in Seward when they found the box. The program left the box as an invitation to create and explore technology and its local applications. Upward Bound’s goal is to improve the graduation rates of high school students and increase the number of UB College Bound graduates who enter colleges and universities.

Guernsey and Veach took the box of parts and transformed it into a drone, adding a camera to collect imagery of flood areas and using Agisoft PhotoScan software to stitch the photos together and create 3D maps. The two students gave the images to local flood authorities to inform their mitigation decisions. This was the start of Guernsey’s upward trajectory.

“This Upward Bound project opened me to the joys and frustrations of real world projects, leading me to UAF as an engineering and Honors student to get involved with more fascinating projects," said Guernsey.

In her first year at UAF, Guernsey engaged in the Eielson Air Force Base innovation project, in which honors students are invited to solve intriguing Arctic environment-based puzzles and challenges that emerge on base. Guernsey’s involvement led her to win an X-Force National Security Innovation Fellowship, an opportunity for technologists and entrepreneurs to serve their country by solving real-world national security problems in collaboration with the U.S. military.

“Lindy is curious, engaged, and driven to apply learning in the classroom to real-world and load-bearing problems,” said Alexander Hirsch, director of the UAF Honors College and an OIPC faculty ambassador. “She is energized and catalyzing and she is a boundary spanner and change agent. In short, she is a model Honors student, and she is modernizing the student experience at UAF.”

Learn more about the UAF Honors College at https://uaf.edu/honors/ or contact Alexander Hirsch at ahirsch@alaska.edu.