Record Number of Northeastern Students and Alumni Earn NSF Graduate Fellowships

Twenty Northeastern University students and alumni have earned the 2018 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship in recognition of their potential to make significant contributions to research, teaching and industrial applications in science, mathematics and engineering. The recipients include 18 students who completed or are about to complete their undergraduate studies at Northeastern and two current graduate students. These prestigious fellowships will support the recipients’ graduate study toward research-based master’s and doctoral degrees with up to $138,000 in combined tuition and stipend funding for each recipient.

The number of students selected for this award, as well as the breadth of disciplines they represent, underscore the scope and vitality of Northeastern’s research enterprise, with 610 new tenured and tenure-track faculty hired since 2006. In 2015, Northeastern was named a “highest research activity” (“R-1”) university by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education.

We invite you to learn more about the pioneering research and future plans of our NSF Graduate Research Fellowship winners.

Melanie Arenson S’15
In her time at Northeastern, Melanie worked in a variety of research settings, including the Conceptual Organization, Reasoning, and Education Lab, the Massachusetts Department of Correction, and the pediatric intensive care unit at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. After graduating, she spent two years at the San Francisco VA Medical Center studying posttraumatic stress disorder and cardiovascular health in veterans. Currently, she is pursuing her Ph.D. in clinical psychology at the University of Maryland, where she studies under Dr. Edward Bernat in the Clinical and Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory. Her research interests broadly involve using physiological and individual difference measures to investigate psychopathology. Specifically, she focuses on how cognitive and affective processes are impacted by trauma and targeted in its treatment.

Lisa Barton S’16
Lisa majored in chemistry and biology at Northeastern, completing co-ops in process chemistry at Cubist Pharmaceuticals and medicinal chemistry at Millennium Pharmaceuticals. She is currently studying for her PhD at Scripps Research Institute, where she works in the lab of Phil Baran. The lab’s research focuses on chemical synthesis, with a goal of providing large quantities of complex natural products with minimal labor and material expenditure.

Thurston Brevett E’18
Thurston’s research interest is in remote sensing and signal processing, which has applications as diverse as airport security, finding heartbeats hidden in rubble, mapping the unknown ocean floor, or identifying and analyzing tumors that might not be apparent to the human eye. He will pursue a PhD in electrical engineering at Stanford.

Jake Campolo CIS’18
Jake will attend Stanford as a PhD student in Earth System Science. He plans to research the application of remote sensing and machine learning to informing and measuring sustainable intensification of agriculture. By combining crop simulations, climate measurements, and satellite imagery, he hopes to develop techniques to remotely study the effectiveness of various soil fertility and management interventions in closing crop yield gaps, at the scale of smallholder farms.

Tibrine Da Fonseca, doctoral student in sociology
Tibrine’s research examines mixed-status immigrant families’ experiences with the health care system in Boston. Through ethnographic research and qualitative interviews, Tibrine plans to explore how household members interpret the local political context and make claims to social citizenship through their utilization of health care. Tibrine is currently a research assistant with the Institute on Urban Health Research, working closely with Dr. Alisa Lincoln on her study Exploring the Pathways Among Discrimination and Health Among Somali Young Adults, funded by the National Institutes of Health. In addition, Tibrine is contributing to an interdisciplinary investigation of “sanctuary cities” through the Global Resilience Institute.

Duy-Khoi Dang S’18
Duy-Khoi will pursue a PhD in Physical Chemistry at the University of Michigan, where he will be studying theoretical chemistry. In particular, he will be developing and applying new quantum mechanical methods to study chemical reactions.

Marlena Duda S’13
While majoring in Biology and minoring in Health Science, Marlena completed two co-ops at the Wall Lab in the Center for Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School, and then continued as a data analyst in the Wall Lab in its new home at Stanford University from 2013-2016. There, Marlena worked on machine learning methods to improve the behavioral detection of autism. Currently, she is a second year PhD student in Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on deep learning approaches to improve mobile sensor and medical image-based diagnosis and monitoring of diseases and understand functional connectivity dynamics in the brain at rest.

Trevor Gale E’18
Before beginning the computer science PhD program at Stanford, Trevor will spend a year working on deep learning research at Google Brain in Mountain View, CA. He plans to work at the intersection of machine learning and computer systems, including hardware and software for high-performance machine learning and data analytics and applications of machine learning in computer systems software and hardware.

Stephanie Gee E’16
Stephanie majored in chemical engineering at Northeastern and is currently a doctoral student in the University of Southern California’s Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, where she works in the research group of Dr. Adam L. Smith. The group’s research evaluates environmental biotechnologies to improve water infrastructure by recovering resources from waste streams.

Laura Goetz S’18
Laura will be studying at UC Santa Cruz’s Ecology and Evolutionary Biology program. The salmonid species Oncorhynchus mykiss is known as rainbow trout when fish are residential and steelhead trout when fish are anadromous. Laura will study embryonic development and genetic expression differences between steelhead and rainbow trout at different water temperatures.

Kevin Gozzi S’16
Kevin credits his extensive undergraduate research experience, particularly his two co-ops in the biology lab of Professor Yunrong Chai, with sparking his passion for biological research and his decision to continue on for the PhD. Kevin is now a doctoral student in the lab of Michael Laub at MIT, where he studies the molecular mechanisms and evolution of information processing at the cellular level.

Christina Migliore S’18
Christina will be studying plasma physics, in particular theoretical and computational modeling of various aspects of basic plasma science like turbulence, magnetic reconnection, and wave phenomena using particle-in-cell and analytic methods. Christina will attend MIT for graduate school.

Elliott Mueller S’17
Elliott will pursue a PhD in Geobiology at Caltech, where he will study the stable isotopes (carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, etc.) of organic biomarkers left in rock by organisms millions of years ago, which can indicate the conditions of the Earth’s climate as well as the environments in which these organisms thrived. Elliott also hopes to work on current and future missions to Mars at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab.

Justin Ramberger E’18
Justin has worked in the Northeastern Laboratory for Advanced Separations and Catalysis under Dr. Sunho Choi since his freshman year, helping to develop and characterize materials for carbon dioxide capture and conversion. He will now pursue a PhD in Chemical Engineering, focused on the study of materials and their properties, at the University of Minnesota.

Nicholas Rioux CIS’18
Nick plans to enroll in a Computer Science PhD program to study programming languages, the essential tools used to construct every computer program. By gaining an understanding of how the design and implementation of programming languages can influence the quality of software which they are used to build, he hopes to help software engineers write applications that are safe, reliable, and correct. He will pursue his doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania.

Justin Roberts S’14
Justin pursued research both on campus and through co-ops at E Ink Corporation and RIKEN, Japan’s largest comprehensive research institution. After graduating, Justin took a research position at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. Now, he is a Ph.D. student in biology at MIT, where he is engaging basic questions in cell and molecular biology and also helping to develop new tools for such research.

Mary Regis Shanley S’14
Mary is a doctoral student at the City University of New York Graduate Center, where she works in the lab of Allyson K. Friedman. The major goal of the lab’s research is to explore how social factors alter neural circuits’ responses to chronic and acute stress and influence susceptibility or resilience to neuropsychiatric disorders such as depression and anxiety. This research could help provide targets for novel mechanistically-driven therapeutics.

Benjamin Sung, doctoral student in physics
A graduate of Cornell University, Benjamin previously earned Northeastern’s RTG Graduate Fellowship to study algebraic geometry and representation theory. He has also co-authored a number of papers in this field.

Allison Traylor DMSB’17
Allison is a doctoral student at Rice University’s Industrial/Organizational psychology program. Over the past year, she has worked on NASA and NSF-funded projects related to teamwork, training, and cross-cultural issues in organizations across a broad range of industries including healthcare, engineering, and aerospace. Her primary research interests include both understanding how to better facilitate teamwork in cross-cultural and demographically diverse groups and understanding the impact of teamwork on women and under-represented minorities in STEM.

Anna Walsh Bouvé’17
Anna is a first-year Environmental Engineering PhD student in Yale’s Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering. Broadly, her work aims to develop and apply novel analytical chemistry and air quality engineering techniques, as well as advanced statistical methods, to characterize air pollution dynamics, with the overall goal of better understanding their impacts and potential mitigation strategies. Anna’s current project focuses on characterizing hydrocarbons emitted from oil sands operations, especially those that go on to form secondary organic aerosol, which is a major component of particulate matter and is known to have significant human health, ecological, and climate impacts.

HONORABLE MENTIONS

In addition, the following six Northeastern undergraduates and alumni received Honorable Mentions in this year’s competition.

Theresa Burnham S’15
Ecology, San Diego State University

Veronica Diaz S’16
Neurosciences, New York University Medical Center

Mahmoud Jalloh S’17
History and Philosophy of Science, University of Southern California

Chase Kelley E’17
Bioengineering

Andrew Wolek E’17
Chemical Engineering, Northwestern University

Yosif Zaki S’18
Neurosciences

The following current graduate students received Honorable Mentions in this year’s competition.

Alexander Grath
Bioengineering

Daniel Patterson
Computer Science