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Eleven SEAS Students Win NSF Fellowships

Biomedical Engineering NSF winners, from left to right, Benjamin Elkin, Andrea Tan, Nora Khanarian, Brenda Chen, Molly Flexman, and Jennifer Walz. Below are Eileen Sun and Matthew Bouchard.

A total of 11 SEAS students have won prestigious graduate fellowships from the National Science Foundation. Six students in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, two each from the Departments of Computer Science and Earth and Environmental Engineering, and one from the Department of Electrical Engineering were recently announced as recipients of these highly competitive fellowships.

The students from the Department of Biomedical Engineering represent nearly 10% of all the NSF Bioengineering/Biomedical Engineering fellowships awarded nationwide. In addition, two other BME students have been awarded graduate research fellowships from Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), the Canadian equivalent of the NSF. 

BME undergraduate Eileen Sun ’08, whose mentor is Assistant Professor Lance Kam, and whose project is “Probing the susceptibility of cells to non-enveloped virus entry with engineered constructs,” was named a 2008 NSF Graduate Fellow. Doctoral candidates in the SEAS Department of Biomedical Engineering who are the recipients of NSF Graduate Fellowships are: Matthew Bouchard, mentored by Assistant Professor Elizabeth Hillman, whose project involves characterization of active probes for dynamic imaging of electrical activity in vivo, and who also won a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship (NDSEG) to be sponsored by the Office of Naval Research (ONR); Brenda Chen, also mentored by Professor Hillman, whose project involves high-resolution in-vivo optical imaging and microscopy of brain function; Nora Khanarian, mentored by Associate Professor Helen H. Lu, whose project is “Design of composite biomimetic scaffolds for osteochondral interface tissue engineering;" Andrea Tan, mentored by Associate Professor Clark T. Hung, whose project is “Hydraulic Permeability: A critical parameter in scaffold design for cartilage tissue engineering;" and Jennifer Walz, mentored by Associate Professor Paul Sajda, whose project is “Maximization of learning rate by re-sampling training data based on cortical gamma activity."

Winners of Canada’s Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) Fellowships are Benjamin Elkin, mentored by Assistant Professor Barclay Morrison, whose project is “Mechanical Properties of Brain Tissue: Implications for Traumatic Brain Injury," and Molly Flexman, mentored by Associate Professor Andreas Hielscher, whose project is “Design of a Digital Optical Tomography System for Dynamic Breast Imaging.

Computer Science Ph.D. students Oliver Cossairt and Alexander Gusev were the recipients of NSF Graduate Fellowships in Computer Information and Sciences Engineering. The NSF Fellowship to Olivier Cossairt, who is advised by T.C. Chang Professor of Computer Science Shree Nayar, will further his work on intelligent displays, new types of visualization systems that sense and react to their physical environment. Alexander Gusev, advised by Assistant Professor Itsik Pe'er, has been awarded the Fellowship for his research work in computational genetics, becoming the first to analyze ancestry of thousands of individuals, and finding surprising results with implications to population genetics and disease research.

Earth and Environmental Engineering students Miriam Okun and Erika Tyler also have been awarded the prestigious fellowships. Miriam Okun, who is advised by Assistant Professor Ah-Hyung Alissa Park and Professor Klaus Lackner, will be researching “Scientific Fundamentals of Mineral Carbon Sequestration.” Erika Tyler, mentored by Assistant Professor Marco Castaldi, will be researching “Methanol Steam Reforming in a MEMS Microcatalytic Reactor.”

From the Department of Electrical Engineering, Christine Smit, whose thesis advisor is Associate Professor Dan Ellis, will be “Investigating the acoustics of the singing voice.” In addition, an NSF Fellowship winner from Cooper Union, Nava Chitrik, will be enrolling in SEAS in the Fall and will be working with Professor Keren Bergman of the Department of Electrical Engineering.