Matthew Thomae is a mechanical engineering major and a student in the Innovations in Honors program. Photo by Brittney Sparn.
Matthew Thomae takes on a lot of responsibilities as a student at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
A mechanical engineering major, Innovations in Honors student and ambassador for the UTC Honors College, Rocket Mocs team member and undergraduate researcher—all impressive, but not unheard-of feats for someone who is a junior in college—Thomae is balancing a full slate of academic and extracurricular commitments.
Thomae, however, only arrived at UTC in the fall of 2025 as a transfer student from Bryan College in Dayton, Tennessee.
“I was looking for more academic opportunities in terms of research,” said Thomae, who lives in Chattanooga with his family. “I also wanted to be closer to a bigger city because Dayton is pretty small.”
That search led him to UTC, where he quickly found what he had been looking for.
“The engineering department is really big, and so I was excited about that,” he said. “Coming to campus and touring, getting to meet all the faculty, they were super helpful and super informative.
“I really enjoyed getting connected with them and then staying home as well. Financials were a big role.”
Thomae’s path to mechanical engineering wasn’t always clear. He started college as a business major before realizing he was more interested in how things work than how they are managed.
“What I realized was I really enjoyed learning and engineering is so vast and broad,” he said. “It helps in almost every field, and every company has engineers and has things that they build. I wanted to understand the technical how things are built, why things are built.”
This is where his love for research comes in. Thomae is currently working on two Honors College research fellowships, both focused on quantum-related technology.
For one project, he is working with Dr. Zihao Wang, assistant professor in the College of Engineering and Computer Science, exploring deep learning and artificial intelligence model creation.
“Last semester, we focused on a model that was taking images, and images get blurry for random reasons,” Thomae explained. “But once you have a blurry image, if you don’t have the initial image, it’s really hard to get the details back.”
They are working to develop a model that would take the blurry image and produce a clear image using AI. While AI can “make it look pretty,” according to Thomae, it’s usually inaccurate.
“We were looking for more structural integrity and physics behind it,” he said. “That way it can be used for X-rays and other medical imagery like CT scans because if the AI model makes up information that it doesn’t have, then it’s not accurate to the patient and it’s not helpful for the clinicians.”
To resolve this, they worked on a model that took the image and generated what it “feels” like a perfect image is. Using blur estimation, the model works through a continuous refinement process.
“And then it would compare how close the original blurry image was to the fabricated image, and then from there, it would complete that cycle and get closer and closer and closer to perfection,” Thomae said.
His second research project is with Associate Professor Murat Barisik, director of the Nanoengineering Center within the UTC Research Institute.
“He’s doing really cool research in nanotechnology, which is a rapidly evolving and new field that we have the computational power to look at things on the nano scale,” Thomae said. “We’re working with artificial intelligence to better predict material properties on a macro scale using model structures and nanoporous materials on a really small scale.”
When Thomae encountered the UTC Rocket Mocs team at an event, it piqued another one of his research interests.
“Aerospace is something that’s really interesting to me because it’s kind of on the cutting edge of research and it’s also somewhere that I think we’re rapidly expanding in as a society,” he said.
He has already helped build mini rockets that the team will launch later this semester.
“Rocket Mocs was a way for me to see if this is a field that I really am interested in or would I rather do nanotechnology or something like that?” he said.
Exploring his interests beyond the Engineering and Computer Science building is something Thomae described as an important part of his college experience. It’s why he applied to join the Innovations in Honors program.
It’s also why he became an Honors College ambassador, so that he can share his experiences with others.
“It allowed me to branch out and make connections with people,” he said. “As a freshman, you’rekind of automatically brought together with different events. As a transfer, not so much.
“It’s been cool to meet like-minded people who are also serious about learning and putting their all in and putting effort into classes and assignments.”
Matthew Thomae builds birdhouses with classmates and students at the Carver Community Center as part of an Innovations in Honors project. Photo by Clara Paulson.
Thomae is currently in Dr. Jordan King’s Innovation Lab, where he is working with his classmates to improve two Chattanooga community centers. His group is helping to beautify and make Carver Park—which connects Carver Community Center and Community Haven—safer for the young children who walk through the area.
Their efforts include installing a bulletin board, a crosswalk and birdhouses with distance markers,“all to try to draw people into the area and give them a reason to come and treat the park as a destination, not just a throughway,” he said.
For Thomae, experiences like these—along with research opportunities—are what connect classwork to something tangible.
“I think learning without having an application for what you’re learning isn’t very beneficial,” he said. “Everything I learn, I want to be able to directly apply.”
Thomae’s deep curiosity has been part of who he is for a long time. He was homeschooled until middle school because, “I asked lots and lots of questions,” he said.
He wanted to understand “not just that it works but why it works,” and that research opens doors to future opportunities.
“One is higher education, like getting a master’s or Ph.D. in something I’m interested in,” he said. “But also, can I take what I’m learning in class and use it to further the academic field or design something? Make something? That’s what is interesting and enjoyable to me.”
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