Ronald Henry Heisser
Ronald Henry Heisser is a School of Engineering Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow in biohybrid robotics whose work integrates his interests in mechanics and design to study and rationalize machine design principles for systems that bridge micro- and macro-scales. Heisser’s doctoral work centered on using combustion to produce high-power motion in millimeter-scale soft actuators, ultimately enabling him to develop a novel, refreshable Braille display system that is potentially more compact a ...
Michael Hagenow
Michael Hagenow is an MIT-Boeing Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow whose research focuses on creating effective and flexible systems for human-robot teaming across a range of applications, with a particular interest in methods for shared autonomy and robot skill acquisition. In his doctoral research, he investigated new approaches for robot behavior acquisition. As a postdoc, Hagenow will continue to pursue innovative techniques that combine iterative learning and human‐in‐the‐loop inte ...
Farhana Easmin
Farhana Easmin is an MIT-Northpond Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow in genomic engineering whose work is focused on genome editing and explorations of genome function and breeding, with the goal of building creative solutions to environmental and human health challenges. In her doctoral research, Easmin developed rapid and versatile genome editing tools for the creation of genome diversity in yeast. As a postdoc, Easmin will apply her experience in yeast genome engineering to environmental b ...
Shaniel Bowen
Shaniel Bowen is a School of Engineering Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow whose research concerns the pathogenesis, diagnosis, and treatment of pelvic floor disorders and, more broadly, improving women’s health and health equity. In her doctoral research, Bowen designed a study on racial disparity in women’s health research, characterizing age and racial diversity in normal pelvic anatomy in adult women and beginning to build an open-access repository of demographic/MRI data of a diverse ...
Elana Ben-Akiva
Elana Ben-Akiva is an MIT-Northpond Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow whose research focuses on leveraging biomaterials engineering approaches to activate or suppress the body’s natural defense mechanisms to treat various diseases, including cancer and infectious diseases. The primary aims of her postdoc research will be to investigate saponin-based nanoparticle adjuvants in combination with toll-like receptor agonists and engineering novel adjuvants for HIV vaccination and to develop lipid ...
Moala Keshei Bannavti
Moala Keshei Bannavti is a Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow whose research aims to address environmental injustice and inequities through interdisciplinary environmental science. Specifically, Bannavti’s doctoral work focused on air quality in public schools — an understudied part of the built environment — and developing new approaches to remediate airborne, semivolatile organic compounds in low-income, minority-predominant public scho ...
Li-Yu Yu
Li-Yu Yu is a PhD candidate whose research seeks to advance the growing field of spectroscopic microscopy, a powerful tool for delivering rich molecular information about an object through the measurement of its spatial and spectral characteristics. Potential applications of spectral microscopy range from medical diagnosis to pharmaceutical research and material identification. Lu-Yu’s current research, supported by a MathWorks Fellowship, addresses the crucial drawback of poor spectral sig ...
Matthew Yeung
Matthew Yeung is a PhD candidate whose research explores interactions between light and nanostructures for both fundamental research and the development of novel optoelectronic technologies. The focus of his current work, supported by a MathWorks Fellowship, is the development of nanostructured devices that can interact with and measure light fields with sub-femtosecond resolution. These devices enable a critical new tool in visible to near-infrared optical metrology: a sampling oscilloscope ...
Kathleen Yang
Kathleen Yang is a PhD candidate whose research interests lie at the intersection of wireless communications and signal processing. In previous work, Kathleen developed an impulsive modulation scheme that encodes information in both time and frequency, as well as a corresponding compressed sensing receiver. A MathWorks Fellowship will support Kathleen’s current work on GRAND-assisted multi-user detection, which is a technique that combines users’ symbols and codebooks to achieve better de ...
Qiuyuan Wang
Qiuyuan Wang is a PhD candidate whose research interests are in spintronics, a rapidly growing field that leverages the electron’s spin degree of freedom and the associated magnetic moment and offers tremendous potential to improve power efficiency and performance in storage and computing technologies. With the support of a MathWorks Fellowship, Qiuyuan is investigating multiple dimensions of spintronics, including emergent topological materials as new building blocks for spintronic devices ...