Jasper Baur

Goldwater nomination and award-winning Detecting Plastic Landmines project

Jasper Baur is Goldwater Scholarship recipient for the 2019-20 school year. Currently studying abroad at the University of Manoa in Hawaii, Baur is working toward his degree in geosciences. His first experience with research at Binghamton University was working on the Geospatial Remote Sensing research stream in the Freshman Research Immersion (FRI) program.

Last year, Baur completed a team project on thermal infrared imaging which won the aerospace and defense category for the 2018 Tech Briefs Create The Future Design Contest. Designed to use "thermal infrared imaging to aerially detect plastic landmines," Jasper's project beat out hundreds of submissions for the category including one submitted by NASA. Their project has implications for device detection in post-conflict nations such as Afghanistan and has the potential to save countless civilian lives.

It was Baur's love for research that brought him to the attention of the nomination committee for the Goldwater scholarship, and despite the length of the submission process, Baur reflects that "it is nice to have practice with questions that may be on job applications in the future."

For more information about Jasper and his team's project, visit their project webpage