James Utton | Mechanical Engineering & Physics Student

Hi, I'm James Utton.

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I am a Mechanical Engineering and Physics student with a passion for solving complex, real-world problems. With a background in research, engineering, and software development, I bring a unique interdisciplinary approach to every project I undertake. I am deeply motivated by innovation, learning, and creating solutions that have real impact.

About

I am an Honors Mechanical Engineering and Physics student at the University of Utah with a 3.90 GPA. I’m passionate about research, mechanical design, and solving complex real-world problems. My experience spans biomechanical research, finite element modeling, CAD design, and prototyping. I enjoy working at the intersection of engineering, medicine, and computation to develop innovative solutions. Outside of work, you’ll find me climbing, hiking, mountain biking, or skiing.

Languages: MatLabs, Python, Java, JavaScript, Arduino C, C, C++, HTML/CSS
Technical Skills: CAD Design (SolidWorks, Fusion 360), Finite Element Modeling (FeBio), 3D Printing, Machining, Mechanical Testing (strain/displacement analysis), Video Processing
Engineering Interests: Surgical Devices, Mechanical Design, Medical Imaging, Biomechanics, Manufacturing Processes

Looking for an opportunity to work in a challenging position combining my skills in Mechanical Engineering, which provides professional development, interesting experiences and personal growth.

Experience

Injury Biomechanics Lab

Research Assistant

Conducted research on the mechanical behavior of organic trabeculae in the brain and skull, contributing to the design of bio-inspired systems for soft-tissue support
Selected for the College of Engineering’s REU program to lead design iteration and testing across 150+ experimental configurations
Developed custom MATLAB tools for video-based displacement tracking and integrated data into over 30 finite element (FE) models
Designed and validated experimental setups to map strain distribution under varying loading conditions, improving model accuracy and physical testing correlation
Collaborated with engineers and researchers to bridge CAD design, prototyping, and computational modeling in a fast-paced biomedical research environment
Selected to present research findings at the 2025 SB3C Conference, highlighting advancements in strain mapping and model validation for organic brain structures
Tools: Python, MatLab, FeBio

September 2024 - Present | Salt Lake City, Utah

Panda Network

Panda Mentor

Providing paid mentorship to physics students, offering guidance on coursework, research, and career development
Facilitating academic success by hosting one-on-one and group mentoring sessions tailored to individual needs
Assisted in organizing workshops and networking events to support student growth and professional opportunities
Tools: Microsoft Office, Zoom, Slack, Google Workspace, Canvas

January 2025 - May 2025 | Salt Lake City, Utah

UofU Chemistry Department

Learning Assistant

Supporting students in understanding fundamental chemistry concepts through group discussion and problem-solving sessions
Collaborating with faculty to enhance student engagement and learning outcomes in introductory chemistry courses
• Initiated the creation of additional study resources to improve comprehension of challenging topics
Tools: Microsoft Office, Zoom, Slack, Google Workspace, Canvas

January 2025 - May 2025 | Salt Lake City, Utah

CIGNEX Datamatics

Project Trainee

Designed a library management system for a local library, where we undertook activities like requirement elicitation, preparing Data Flow and Entity-Relationship diagrams.
Delivered a solution for a POC involving Automatic Financial Document Classifier using Natural Language Processing and Support Vector Machines with 96% accuracy on the company’s data.
Tools: Python, Scikit-learn, NLTK

June 2017 - July 2017 | Ahmedabad, India

Projects

                
Music Player Web-App
                  A music streaming web app based on Django
                
AccomplishmentsTools: Django, HTML, CSS, Bootstrap, SQLite, AWS S3, Heroku
Register/login to the web app(with OAuth-based Google Sign-In).
Search and filter songs based on language and singer.
Create multiple playlists and add/remove songs to/from playlist.
Scroll through recently played/viewed songs.

Quiz Web-App
                  A quiz playing web app based on Django
                
AccomplishmentsTools: Django, HTML, CSS, Bootstrap, SQLite, Heroku
Register/login to the web app(with OAuth-based Google Sign-In).
Play Quiz and see the leaderboard

Blog Web-App
                  A simple and extensible blog web-app based on Flask.
                
AccomplishmentsTools: HTML, CSS, Bootstrap, Flask, SQLAlchemy, Postgresql, Python
Users can view posts and contact the admin via Contact Page.
Admin can Add, Delete, Update posts.

Visual Question Answering
                  An attention-based classification model that aims at generating an answer for a given input image.
                
AccomplishmentsIncorporated Convolution Neural Networks (CNN) for extracting image features and Long Short Term
                    Memory for extracting question
                    embeddings.
Tested the model on the COCO dataset, abstract scenes images, and got 69% overall accuracy on the
                    VQA evaluation metric.

Video Summarizer
                  A Seq2Seq model that generates a short summary of the given input video.
                
AccomplishmentsIncorporated CNN to detect and classify objects in the video frames and Long Short Term Memory for
                    generating a summary.
Evaluated the model on MSVD (Microsoft Video Description Corpus) dataset; achieved 0.77, 0.71,
                    0.52 scores respectively on ROGUE,
                    BLEU, METEOR evaluation metrics.

Image Generator
                  An image generator based on the concept of adversarial networks (GANs)
                
AccomplishmentsDeveloped system was tested on a human-face database and loss was calculated by comparing the PCAs
                    of generated and original image.
Calculated difference in PCA was less than 10%, depicting the successful generation of an image by
                    the generator.

Head Counting System
                  A system that calculates the attendance of the class from a panoramic image of a live classroom.
                
AccomplishmentsUsed Singular Value Decomposition for image compression; applied various image processing
                    techniques and morphological operations to
                    detect the number of heads.