Jie Deng
Jie Deng is a PhD candidate in systems ecology whose interdisciplinary research is focused on the emerging area of theoretical community ecology. Specifically, Jie is developing a series of potentially groundbreaking hypotheses about how living systems form and develop. Her central proposal—that living systems assemble in ways that maximize the probability of persistence—could be used to forecast and engineer these systems. She is developing a probabilistic theoretical framework, built in ...
Attias Ariel
Attias Ariel is a PhD candidate whose research is focused on designing resilient structures in urban environments that are better able to withstand natural disasters. With the support of a MathWorks Fellowship, he will develop a novel approach, assessing the resilience of urban structures by combining finite elements and statistical physics principles. This strategy characterizes fracture at the element level using spins, describing fracture in a statistical ensemble, effectively bridging the ...
Xingcheng Zhou
Xingcheng Zhou is a PhD candidate whose research focuses on developing simple, accurate, and economical electrochemical diagnostics, which are especially crucial for healthcare in low-resource settings. Supported by her second MathWorks Fellowship, Xingcheng will extend her productive work on electrochemical sensors to diagnose bacterial and viral infectious diseases by conjugating biomolecules on the surface of electrodes to capture disease biomarkers and convert the capture to an electrical ...
Oliver Xie
Oliver Xie is a PhD candidate whose research interests are focused on block copolymers and the unique properties arising from their self-assembled morphologies. With the support of his second MathWorks Fellowship, Oliver will build on his previous research achievements using MATLAB tools to explore polymer sequence morphology relationships. His objectives include a novel reinterpretation of polymer sequences as not simply a series of chemicals but rather as both a signal with a spectrum, and ...
Arjav Shah
Arjav Shah is a PhD candidate whose research focuses on developing sterility testing methods for cell and gene therapies for human disease. Specifically, Arjav is working on new strategies to make biomanufacturing safer through the real-time detection of adventitious agents, such as viruses, at various points in the manufacturing process. With the support of his second MathWorks Fellowship, Arjav is pursuing a highly promising novel application of nanopore sensors to fingerprint viruses. The ...
Devosmita Sen
Devosmita Sen is a PhD candidate whose research aims to quantify the topology-property relationships in polymer networks, their fracture properties, structure, and dynamics. A MathWorks Fellowship will support Devosmita’s ongoing work to develop MATLAB-based models of complex polymer networks and create a topological framework for modeling dynamic polymer networks, which can adapt and transform through stimuli-induced bond exchanges. Her goal is to better understand the useful macroscopic p ...
Juliet Okorie
Juliet Okorie is a PhD candidate whose research interests focus on characterizing the energy production and storage capacity of electrodes. Specifically, Juliet is working to optimize a scalable electrochemical cell for methane oxidative coupling (MOC), a process that could potentially convert the greenhouse gas methane into higher-value carbon molecules for jet fuel in a clean and energetically feasible way. With the support of a MathWorks Fellowship, Juliet will continue her work to model t ...
Kariana Moreno Sader
Kariana Moreno Sader is a PhD candidate whose research explores new strategies for decarbonizing the trucking sector, a crucial but challenging part of the economy to decarbonize in the interest of mitigating climate change. Kariana’s previous work included investigations of battery electric and hydrogen approaches. Her second MathWorks Fellowship will enable her to extend this work to liquid organic hydrogen carriers (LOHCs), which could be substantially more cost- effective than battery e ...
Lexy LeMar
Lexy LeMar is a PhD candidate in atmospheric chemistry whose primary research interests are in the process of oxidation. Specifically, Lexy studies the oxidation of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in the atmospheric aqueous phase through laboratory research and MATLAB-based mechanistic modeling. With the support of a MathWorks Fellowship, she will utilize her novel model to obtain kinetic parameters from chamber and bulk aqueous phase experiments and gain new mechanistic insights on oxidati ...
Nicholas King
Nicholas King is a PhD candidate whose primary interests are in transport phenomena and soft matter and in creating computational models for medical applications. His current research, supported by a MathWorks Fellowship, explores disease-fighting leukocytes (white blood cells) in the immune system with the goal of advancing the development of leukocyte-based drug carriers. Specifically, Nicholas is developing a new biophysical model of leukocyte extravasation, which describes the migration o ...