Grad students

PhD student receives competitive Department of Defense fellowship

Anonymous — Mon, 11 Jul 2022 15:53:46 +0000

PhD student receives competitive Department of Defense fellowship Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 07/11/2022 - 09:53

Electrical engineering PhD student Michelle Pirrone has won a prestigious Department of Defense fellowship for her promising research in microwave engineering and machine learning.

National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowships provide three years of funding for tuition and fees, as well as a monthly stipend and travel budget. The DoD awards approximately 500 fellowships each year to students across the country.

We asked Pirrone to share some thoughts on her journey in electrical engineering and advice for those considering a PhD path.

How did you originally choose to study electrical engineering?

I originally started as a mechanical engineering major in my undergrad but had an electrical engineering professor recruit me for research on antennas and 3D printing. I thought it would be a good opportunity to try something new, so I gave it a shot and loved working on microwaves engineering so much that I switched majors and decided to continue with the work in my PhD.

What made you decide to pursue your PhD at CU Boulder?

After working on the antenna research in undergrad, I felt that I had only just scratched the surface with microwaves engineering and really wanted to learn more and try to solve many of the questions or problems I had encountered in my original research. When I came to CU Boulder for visit week, it was my first time in Colorado, and I fell in love with the region. Both the professors and the students in the microwaves program were very welcoming and worked well together, which was a camaraderie that I had not seen at any other program. I decided then to take the leap, not only with going for a PhD, but also moving across the country to Colorado.

Tell us about the project you’re working on now. What do you find most interesting or satisfying about the work?

I am currently working on integrating machine learning techniques into microwaves systems that change in real time. As the requirements for things like communication systems and reconfigurable networks continue to increase, we are hoping to address these demands by allowing machine learning techniques to dynamically improve system performance as operating conditions vary. I originally started the PhD program working solely on microwave design, but I love the challenge of having to work on two very technical and different topics as microwaves engineering and machine learning are. Not many people have tried to put these topics together before like we are doing, and the projects are forcing me to take new approaches to problems in totally different ways than I would never have had to before.

What is your favorite part about working with your faculty co-advisors, Taylor Barton and Emiliano Dall’Anese?

Both of my advisors have been really great about being open-minded and giving me the room to make some of my own decisions and choices as we work on projects. However, I also always feel like they are there for me when I need support or am stuck on a part of my research and don't know how to continue. I believe we have struck up a really good balance of independence and mentorship, and the three of us work very well on capitalizing on each other's strengths for the research.

What’s next after you finish your PhD?

I still have a few years to go before finishing my PhD, and I like to always keep my opportunities open until it's time to make the final decision. I think I am currently considering going into industry to get some new experience after spending several years in the academic sphere, but only time will tell.

What advice would you give students considering pursuing their PhD?

For most of my time in undergrad, getting a PhD was not on my radar. It wasn't until I found a topic of interest that I really enjoyed that I started to seriously consider graduate school. And even though I work on totally different topics than I did in my undergrad research, there has always been a level of engagement with my work in which I always had been asking questions on if something was possible or how something worked, and now I could actually answer these questions that no one had before. Getting a PhD requires always trying to solve problems or innovate, and I think anyone considering getting a PhD needs to ask themselves if they will enjoy both the frustrations and the satisfaction that comes with forging their own path forward on things no one has really done before.

Do you have any hobbies you’d like to share?

As probably a large portion of Colorado shares, I love being outdoors and in particular love hiking. It's amazing to me how many beautiful hikes are such a short drive away from this area, and I really like doing long hikes that get you far away from the typical hustle bustle of our everyday lives. In addition to that, I really like to cook and try to make foods I've tried at restaurants at home and also like to weight lift.

Anything else you want readers to know about you or your work?

I really didn't expect to be where I am in my life right now or working on what I do, but I took some chances on trying new things along the way, and I'm hoping to continue to push the limits in my research of what's out there now and what we can accomplish.

Michelle Pirrone has won a prestigious National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship for her promising research in microwave engineering and machine learning.

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PhD student receives competitive PEO Scholar Award

Anonymous — Tue, 28 Apr 2020 17:21:36 +0000

PhD student receives competitive PEO Scholar Award Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 04/28/2020 - 11:21

Kate Doubleday was wrapping up an undergraduate degree in biology when some environmental studies courses sparked her interest in combatting climate change.

“I decided I wanted to look into career options that might help with systemic change in carbon emissions,” she said. “I thought engineering would be a good fit.”

So after some time off, she dove back into school, this time chipping away at some engineering prerequisites before embarking on her master’s at CU Boulder.

Now, Doubleday is a year away from completing her PhD in power systems engineering, focusing on how to integrate renewable energy into existing power grids.

To help make that final year easier, she has received a Scholar Award given by the International Chapter of the PEO Sisterhood, a philanthropic organization focused on promoting educational opportunities for women. Scholar Awards provide up to $15,000 to doctoral students who have made significant contributions to their field and proven themselves as leaders.

As she was finishing her master’s, Doubleday took a class in renewable energy and the future power grid with Associate Professor Bri-Mathias Hodge and realized it was exactly what she wanted to pursue for her PhD research. After a summer internship at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, where Hodge also serves as chief scientist in the Power Systems Engineering Center, she stayed to complete her dissertation through an NREL-funded project.

Doubleday’s research is intended to help electric utilities make decisions more confidently, she said.

“Because they are mandated to always provide reliable electricity to their customers, they tend to have a more conservative mindset,” she said. “With the large-scale changes to their generation sources that are going on, they tend to err on the side of too conservative, which has high cost impacts and doesn’t take full advantage of carbon-free electricity.”

She explained that utilities often have a lot of backup generation going on just in case things go wrong, which is wasteful.

“The hope is with better forecasts, we can reduce that amount of excessive margin but still be able to provide reliable electricity,” Doubleday said.

Doubleday is also a leader at NREL, where she helped to start a group for LGBTQ+ employees that has quickly grown to more than 60 members. The group has contributed to initiatives like a pride fundraiser and supporting re-designation of all-gender bathrooms.

In his nomination letter for the PEO Scholar Award, Hodge called Doubleday one of the best graduate students he’s worked with in his career.

“Kate has a phenomenal ability to quickly learn new areas and make outstanding research contributions in a short time,” he said. “Since she spends time at NREL and is exposed to a number of disparate research areas, I have managers at the lab asking me on practically a weekly basis when she will graduate, so that they can hire her into their groups in a full-time role.”

Scholar Awards provide up to $15,000 to doctoral students who have made significant contributions to their field and proven themselves as leaders.

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Shedding light on a moving target

Anonymous — Wed, 31 Jul 2019 22:14:48 +0000

Shedding light on a moving target Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 07/31/2019 - 16:14

Emily Adams

Sending a doughnut-shaped beam through optical fiber may hold the key to better brain imaging.

When physics PhD student Brendan Heffernan began working with Juliet Gopinath, associate professor of electrical, computer and energy engineering and physics, he was intrigued by something a previous PhD student in her lab had observed.

Robert Niederriter (MPhys’13, PhD ’16) observed that two laser beams launched into an optical fiber at slightly different times could produce a doughnut-shaped output that does not change as the fiber is moved around.

Niederriter and colleagues postulated that the fiber could be used for stimulated emission depletion microscopy, a technique that won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 2014. In STED, a doughnut-shaped beam provides a clever way around the resolution limit set by the diffraction of light, which hampers other microscopy techniques.

It’s taken a few years, but Heffernan has demonstrated that Niederriter’s beam can be used to create a miniature STED microscope capable of studying brain activity in freely behaving animals. The team’s proof of concept was published today in the Nature Research journal Scientific Reports.

To image the brain of a freely behaving animal – rather than one that is anesthetized or restrained – you need a beam that doesn’t change shape when the optical fiber carrying it moves and bends. Heffernan has successfully identified the combination of light modes and optical components to accomplish that. And he did it all with commercially available parts, which means the microscope will be much cheaper to build than competing technology.

Key Collaborators

Work for the Scientific Reports paper was performed in collaboration with Stephanie Meyer, senior research associate at CU Anschutz, who has built custom STED microscopes.

Neiderriter developed the idea of using his beam in STED with CU Anschutz professors Emily Gibson and Diego Restrepo, who had developed a benchtop superresolution microscope, as well as University of Denver Professor Mark Siemens.

Gopinath and Gibson will serve as principal investigators on the NSF grant, with Restrepo and Siemens serving as co-PIs.

Bypassing the diffraction limit would allow researchers to look at very tiny objects, like the dendritic spines on neurons. Scientists know that changes in the spines are tied to learning and memory, but they’re not sure exactly how or why.

“We can’t tell how these dynamic changes in shape affect memory because they’re blurred out,” Heffernan said. “If we can resolve the changes and watch them in mice as they’re learning and behaving, we’d learn more about how they work.”

The team has also received a National Science Foundation grant that will allow them to build a miniature version of the STED microscope. Their vision is for two instruments housed at the CU Boulder Light Microscopy Core Facility and the CU Anschutz Advanced Light Microscopy Facility, where the wider research community could use them to study changes in minute neuronal structures in awake animals during their everyday behaviors, like learning and social interactions.

Zoe Donaldson is one of several researchers who has expressed interest in the technology. Her recent research involves monogamous prairie voles – specifically, the grief they experience when they lose their mate.

"Grief changes the brain,” she said. “With this new scope, we will be able to chart these changes with an unprecedented level – asking how brain cells form or lose connections as an animal recovers from the loss of their partner."

Sending a doughnut-shaped beam through optical fiber may hold the key to better brain imaging.

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GAANN fellowships available for grad students interested in materials research

Anonymous — Mon, 05 Nov 2018 17:33:26 +0000

GAANN fellowships available for grad students interested in materials research Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 11/05/2018 - 10:33

Two faculty members in electrical, computer and energy engineering have won grants from the U.S. Department of Education to train students with the skills needed to design high-tech materials, and the ability to teach those skills to others.

Graduate Assistance in Areas of National Need (GAANN) provides fellowships for graduate students who are planning to pursue a degree in a field designated as an area of national need. Both CU Boulder projects are aimed at keeping the U.S. competitive in materials research in the face of rapid growth in Asian research efforts.

Both projects will also focus on recruiting women and underrepresented minority students, in order to better meet the needs of today’s workforce.

Materials for Energy Conversion and Sustainability

Professor Won Park, along with Jennifer Cha of chemical and biological engineering, will lead a GAANN program focused on designing the next-generation materials needed for domestic science, economics and defense.

These materials must perform specific functions, but also need to use less energy, be non-toxic to the environment and depend on renewable energy sources – goals that can sometimes be contradictory and difficult to meet.

For example, polymers are important materials for preserving structure and packaging consumer products, but environmental needs require that they can be recycled and reused. New photonic and electronic 2- and 3D nanoscale materials are also required for electronic and optical components that can be integrated into living systems as parts of low-power, flexible, wireless devices or smart, sustainable drug delivery agents.

Other example technology issues that will be addressed the GAANN students will include polymers as biomaterial scaffolds and drug delivery systems, solventless processing via photopolymerization, nanostructured organics for separation and purification, optical nanostructures for energy conversion, nanoscale catalysts for fuel production from biomass and renewable resources, photocatalysts for wastewater pretreatment, enzymes for fuel production, nonlinear optical materials for sensing, computing and communications, self-assembled nanomaterials, advanced ceramic materials, and organic and hybrid inorganic photovoltaic devices.

The project will also address how materials engineering techniques can be better integrated into electrical and chemical engineering curricula.

Other faculty members involved in the project are Juliet Gopinath, Shu-Wei Huang, Robert McLeod, Garret Moddel, Rafael Piestun and Sean Shaheen of electrical, computer and energy engineering, and Kristi Anseth, Chris Bowman, Robert Davis, Adam Holewinski, Andrew Goodwin, Michael McGehee, Will Medlin, Charles Musgrave, Dan Schwartz and Alan Weimer from chemical and biological engineering.

Soft Materials

Professor Robert McLeod, along with Stephanie Bryant of chemical and biological engineering, will lead a GAANN focused on the growing field of soft materials.

Since the founding of the soft materials field 30 years ago, the unique behaviors of these materials have spawned entirely new disciplines of soft robotics, nanofabrication, DNA-directed self-assembly, liquid crystals, artificial muscles, regenerative medicine and many more.

Students involved with the program could create new concrete-polymer composites that keep civil infrastructure from failing due to freezing and aging; light-converting polymer films that enhance plant growth in green houses; transparent and thermally insulating flexible polymeric films to improve energy efficiency for windowpanes; new classes of polymers to enable recycling while maintaining ease of manufacture and properties; new theories of dynamic networks that describe polymers with reversible bonds in active soft matter; next generation holographic polymers for augmented reality headsets; soft optics for deep, chronic and high quality tissue imaging such as the brain; and 3D printed structural polymers and stem-cell laden hydrogels for cartilage repair.

The program will increase the pool of well-trained PhD students in the soft materials area ready to enter research and teaching jobs in academia and industry. Students will have each had academic exposure through supervised teaching, industrial exposure through industrial or international internships, and community exposure through outreach experience to K-12 schools or the general public.

Other faculty members involved in the project are Kristi Anseth, Chris Bowman, Andrew Goodwin, Charles Musgrave, Daniel Schwartz, Jeffrey Stansbury and Timothy White of chemical and biological engineering, and Yifu Ding, Christoph Keplinger, Ivan I. Smalyukh, Wil Srubar, Wei Tang, Franck Vernerey and Xiaobo Yin of the Materials Science and Engineering Program.

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