Check out this news cast about a team of students from VAR who have developed a mental health and mindfulness app to help combat stress and depression during the pandemic. The app tracks users' emotions and suggests activities and resources to ease their mental health struggles. This is a great example of the innovative work
I am a graduate student and currently working as a research assistant for Penn State under Dr. Shelton, in collaboration with Dr. Lisa Elliott, Dr. Richard Zhao, and Mr. Jacob Marsh. The research team was awarded the 2020 COVID Immediate Human Relief Fund by the Erie County Gaming Revenue Authority in the summer of 2020.
I am an undergraduate researcher working for VAR Lab under a grant that is allowing me to be paid to do public relations research that will later be used to develop a public relations campaign. This research is being conducted for a majority of the summer of 2020 under the Penn State Behrend 2020 Undergraduate
This summer I worked as a research assistant under grants awarded through Penn State. The first was the Summer 2020 Remote Innovation Grant through the Student Engagement Network, and the second was the Penn State Behrend 2020 Undergraduate Student Summer Remote Research Grant. Both grants were worked on separately over the course of the summer. The grants allowed me to explore the literature on virtual and
Karrie Bowen became a faculty affiliate of VAR Lab in July of 2020. She is a communication professor at Penn State Behrend who specializes in social media and public relations. Karrie hopes to be able to use her skills to shape the public perception of the lab. Her skillset as an addition to the lab
VAR Lab recently acquired a medical-grade UV-C headset cleaning box to keep its equipment sterile. The lab hopes to resume some of its in-person operations fall of 2020. This is contingent upon what university, state, and federal guidelines will be in the fall regarding COVID-19. Having lab members go into the lab space has some
VAR Lab is happy to announce that we have recently been able to add the Microsoft HoloLens 2 to the list of our equipment. The HoloLens 2’s are leading edge technology when it comes to Augmented reality. Its ability to project images into real space combines the benefits of VR while still retaining the ability
VAR Lab recently acquired the capability to do LiDAR scans via our acquisition if the FARO FOCUS s70. VAR is the first organization at Penn State to acquire a FARO scanner as advanced as this one and we plan to put it to good use! LiDAR allows us to scan environments or objects to
VAR Labs has been up for almost a year now, and although there have been many visitors to the lab including department chairs and other important members of the school, nothing has been bigger than STEAM fair. On February 10th, 1,500+ people attended Penn State Behrend's sixth-annual Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math (STEAM) fair.
Thank you to The Corry Journal for publishing this article about STEM education in the local school district. The article highlights the school district's efforts to integrate STEM into its curriculum and features an interview with Chris Shelton, the director of VAR. Shelton discusses the importance of STEM education in preparing students for future careers
