Four Hopkins BME students awarded NSF Fellowships

Four PhD candidates studying biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins University have earned prestigious fellowship awards through the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP). This program recognizes outstanding graduate student researchers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, providing the 2,000 awardees with three years of financial support.

The oldest graduate fellowship of its kind, the highly competitive 2018 NSF GFRP received more than 12,000 applications from across the country. Chosen for their high potential for future academic and professional success, the 2018 awardees from Johns Hopkins BME are:

Julie Shade:
Shade is a first-year PhD student in the Computational Cardiology Lab led by Natalia Trayanova, the Murray B. Sachs Professor of Biomedical Engineering. Her research involves using multiple modalities to create highly personalized virtual hearts, and performing computer simulations of cardiac electrophysiology. Shade is incorporating machine learning with her simulation results to predict clinical outcomes and improve care for patients with cardiac disease.

Raleigh Linville:
Interested in tissue engineering the human blood-brain barrier, Linville is a second-year PhD student in the laboratory of Peter Searson, Joseph R. and Lynn C. Reynolds Professor of Materials Science and Engineering. By integrating microvascular tissue engineering techniques and stem cell technology, Linville is creating models of human brain microvessels in health and disease.

Neha Thomas:
Thomas is a first-year PhD student in the lab of Jeremy Brown, John C. Malone Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering. She is developing an experimental test bed to compare several types of haptic modalities, including force feedback and vibrotactile feedback, for upper-limb prosthetic devices. The goal of her research is to elucidate better tactile feedback mechanisms for myoelectric prostheses and understand how users integrate haptic feedback to control such devices.

Emily Su:
Su is a second-year PhD student in the lab of Patrick Cahan, assistant professor of biomedical engineering. Her research focuses on developing methods to analyze single-cell RNA sequencing data, and ordering individual cells along their developmental trajectory. With an interest in stem cell engineering, Su and her team are using these tools to answer developmental biology questions and to improve in vitro differentiation protocols.