Four ECE students earn prestigious NSF Graduate Research Fellowships

Four students from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The Grainger College of Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have received funding as part of the 2026 National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP).

Shane Andres, Henry Lin, Ivan Ren, and Jason Li are among 52 Illinois students selected for the 2026 NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP), the highest number of Illinois recipients in the university's history. Each fellowship provides three years of support, including a $37,000 annual stipend and a $16,000 cost-of-education allowance. This honor recognizes their potential to make significant contributions to research and innovation.

For the four ECE recipients, the fellowship will support research spanning marine ecosystems, semiconductor technology, environmental sensing, and energy and telecommunications. Their diverse research interests reflect the breadth of opportunities available to ECE students as they explore how electrical and computer engineering can address challenges across industries and disciplines.

The NSF fellowships will provide support as they take the next steps in their research careers, continuing a tradition of Illinois ECE students using engineering to advance technology and address complex problems.

Shane Andres

Andres graduated from Illinois with a degree in electrical engineering in December 2025. He will continue his education in the Applied Ocean Science and Engineering Ph.D. program through the MIT-Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Joint Program.

Andres' research will combine engineering, data science, and marine science to study bioacoustics, with a focus on identifying the sounds produced by fish and marine mammals.

One of the first stages of his doctoral research will involve developing machine learning tools to monitor a population of dolphins in Wellfleet Harbor, Massachusetts. By using computational methods to analyze underwater sounds, Andres hopes to develop better tools for understanding marine animal behavior and the ecosystems in which they live.

Following his Ph.D., Andres plans to pursue a career as a project scientist at an academic or research laboratory. He hopes to contribute to research examining the impacts of human activity on ecosystems and informing more sustainable practices.

“I'm honored to receive the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and extremely grateful to all of the mentors who invested so much time in helping me reach this point,” Andres said.

Henry Lin

Lin recently graduated from Illinois with a B.S. in electrical engineering and a minor in semiconductor engineering. He will continue at Illinois as a Ph.D. student under the guidance of Professor Elyse Rosenbaum.

His research focuses on electrostatic discharge (ESD), the phenomenon behind the small shocks people may experience after walking across a carpet and touching a metal object. While such a discharge is generally harmless to people, a similar event inside a semiconductor chip can damage microscopic devices and cause the circuit to fail.

Lin's current research focuses on understanding the voltage levels at which circuits fail during an ESD event. This information can help engineers design more effective ESD protection and develop semiconductor devices that are more robust and reliable.

Receiving the fellowship, Lin says, is both an honor and an encouragement as he begins his graduate studies. “It motivates me to continue asking difficult questions, to grow as a researcher, and to create a lasting impact on advanced technologies,” he said.

Ivan Ren

Ren graduated from Illinois in spring 2026 with a degree in electrical engineering and minors in computer science and mathematics. His research interests lie at the intersection of environmental sensing, controlled environments, and organism health estimation.

His work has involved deploying sensors in marine and terrestrial environments, simulating different natural environments, and modeling how organisms respond to abiotic conditions such as temperature, humidity, and other environmental factors.

Ren plans to continue exploring these questions this fall as a master's student in the Responsive Environments group at the MIT Media Lab. His longer-term goal is to pursue a Ph.D. and better understand how environments can be simulated and what makes a particular environment optimal for growing an organism.

“This fellowship is both a culmination of the time spent fleshing out my research directions, and formal recognition for all the hard work, faith, and growth,” Ren said. “Not only from me, but from my family, my advisors Professor Viktor Gruev and Professor Fuller, my friends and past influences that inspired my journey.”

Jason Li

Li recently graduated from Illinois with a B.S. in physics and a minor in electrical engineering. As an undergraduate, he conducted semiconductor photonics research with Professor Can Bayram in ECE and gained research experience through programs at EPFL in Switzerland and MIT.

At Illinois, Li studied the factors that limit the efficiency of nitride-based light-emitting diodes, including recombination, polarization-induced effects, thermal effects, light extraction, and voltage losses. His work has focused on identifying and separating these different sources of efficiency loss to help guide the development of more efficient LEDs.

Improving the efficiency of green LEDs could contribute to higher-efficiency white lighting, while advances in ultraviolet LEDs could enable broader applications, including germicidal technologies. Li is also working toward research that examines a broader range of LED wavelengths, from green and blue to violet and ultraviolet.

This fall, Li will begin a Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he plans to research wide- and ultrawide-bandgap semiconductor devices for radio-frequency and power applications.

He hopes to become a professor researching semiconductor technologies that can address climate and energy challenges.

“I would like my research to reduce emissions and improve equitable access to the energy grid,” Li said. “I believe that professors and research scientists have power as not only researchers, but as educators and advocates.”

For Li, earning the NSF GRFP has been a goal since his first year at Illinois.

“I’ve known I wanted to pursue a Ph.D. for a while now, and ever since I heard about the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship my freshman year, I wanted to win one,” he said. “It’s an honor to be supported by the GRFP, and it will enable me to do important research on semiconductor devices with applications in the energy grid and telecom.”