Human tissue engineering to repair damage to cartilage, or meniscus, in the knee is a technology that Cornell master of engineering student Andrea Ippolito hopes to contribute someday to the biomedical engineering field.

Ippolito, the winner of the 2006 Engineering Research Showcase poster competition in the graduate student category, displayed the results of her ongoing meniscus engineering experiments alongside the research of more than 120 other master's, Ph.D. and undergraduate students at this year's College of Engineering research showcase. A panel of judges from companies including Intel and Xerox selected the best posters for awards, based on such criteria as quality of research, aesthetic display and clarity of description.

Lining the Duffield Hall atrium were more than 80 posters representing student research projects within the college. Standing before their displays, the student researchers engaged onlookers who stopped to survey the brightly colored, detail-laden posters. From Ippolito's work culturing human meniscus cells, to Operations Research and Industrial Engineering student Erick Diaz's algorithm to improve interstate truck delivery routes, every discipline or field in the college was represented in the showcase.

Other award winners included Dmitriy Levchenkov, a Ph.D. operations research student, for "Scheduling Cornell Final Exams" (second place, graduate student category); Marleen Kamperman, materials science and engineering Ph.D. candidate, for her poster, "High Temperature Ceramics with Hierarchically Ordered Pore Structure" (third place, graduate student category); and biological and environmental engineering student John Polimeni, whose "Neural Mouse Project" reaped top honors in the undergraduate research category.

An important judging criterion, according to judge Heidi M. Grenek, systems engineering manager for Xerox, was the ability for students to communicate their projects to a lay audience -- a skill the students will need when looking for jobs.

For the second time in as many years, the college timed the research showcase with the start of Career Fair Days, a universitywide event that brings job recruiters from all fields to campus.

"The purpose is to attract employers and recruiters interested in talking to our students," said Jeffrey K. Newman, director of research and graduate studies for the College of Engineering.

The four judges who chose the winners of the poster contest all represented large, publicly traded companies that provide research funding to the college with the hope of tapping the best and brightest students to join their companies after the students graduate.

"Everyone is interested in tech transfer," said judge John P. Spoonhower, director of venture capital in university investments for Eastman Kodak. "The highest form of tech transfer is getting the person who actually did the work."

The other judges were: Kimberly W. Sills, higher education program manger for Intel, and Nader Mehravari, principle research scientist at Lockheed Martin.

Robert C. Richardson, Cornell's senior vice provost for research, said before the award winners were announced that all the posters were "spectacular."

"If you walk around and look, the thing that's overwhelming is the breadth of scientific and technological subject matter," Richardson said.