Junior Erin McManus, a computer science and mathematics major, was a finalist in the 2011 Computing Research Association’s Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award competition. McManus was honored for research she conducted on avatars (computer users’ representations of themselves in a computer game or other electronic environment) at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics (MPI) in Tübingen, Germany. She used MPI’s state-of-the-art facilities to design and run an experiment that looked at the effects of avatars on human performance in virtual environments. The research was in collaboration with MPI and the Learning in Virtual Environments lab in VUSE’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

The CRA award program recognizes undergraduate students in North American universities who show outstanding potential in an area of computing research.