The STAR (Students Tackling Advanced Research) Scholars Program is an opportunity for 150 highly motivated first-year students to engage in an early faculty-mentored undergraduate research, scholarship, or creative experience during the summer after their freshman year. This highly competitive program seeks to identify and encourage students to take a hands-on approach to their education through undergraduate research.
During her four years at LCHS, she co-developed and co-taught the 3-D modeling course her senior year, during the program’s infancy. Cate earned the STEM Certification along with her high school diploma.
As a STAR Scholar, Cate was tasked with completing 350 hours of faculty-mentored activity, and their summer experience culminated with a presentation at the annual STAR Scholars Summer Showcase.
The research that she performed for STAR involved building an automated database for ethical hackers regarding industrial control systems. Here is a snippet of her work on ethical hacking that she presented in the Summer Showcase:
“Ethical hackers are tasked with finding and reporting vulnerabilities, weaknesses, and exploits in systems including industrial control systems (ICS). ICS control essential functions in systems such as electric grids, nuclear power plants, security systems, and building automation systems. Ethical hackers need to find and decide which vulnerabilities to exploit based on a variety of factors such as vulnerability severity, attack vectors, and attack complexity. To find this information ethical hackers must manually search across multiple data sources and then make decisions. Ethical hackers may have to sort through thousands of vulnerabilities to determine which ones to exploit first. Our goal was to automate this searching and decision-making process.”
Cate is currently working for the U.S. Navy Surface Warfare Center in Philadelphia as part of her Drexel Fall/Winter co-op cycle, performing similar tasks. Lancaster Catholic’s plans to enhance its STEM initiatives include Project Lead The Way.