Three PhD students honored with Beckman Fellowship awards

Recently, three ECE ILLINOIS PhD students were announced as recipients of the 2019 Beckman Institute student awards. These awards are presented to both undergraduate and graduate students during a reception in May. 

PhD student Yayao Ma was named as one of the recipients of the Nadine Barrie Smith Memorial Fellowship. In honor of Nadine Barrie Smith's life and achievements, this fund provides fellowships to female engineering graduate students who are conducting research in the general field of medical imaging (e.g. ultrasound, optical, magnetic resonance) at the Beckman Institute.

Ma is leading research on neuron spiking imaging on a high-speed fluorescence lifetime imaging microscope that she developed from scratch in ECE ILLINOIS Assistant Professor Liang Gao's lab. She is studying compressed ultrafast photography, which allows for capturing images of events happening faster than nanoseconds and allows for blur-free observations in applications with basic science, industry, and the medical field. Ma is planning on working with ECE ILLINOIS Associate Professor Gabriel Popescu and Catherine Best-Popescu of Bioengineering.

PhD students Leda Sari and Jiahui Yu were named as the two recipients of the Thomas and Margaret Huang Award for Graduate Research. In honor of Thomas and Margaret Huang's contributions to science, technology, and society, this fund provides awards for graduate students who are conducting research in the broad area of human-computer intelligent interaction at the Beckman Institute. 

Sari is working with ECE ILLINOIS Professor Mark Hasegawa-Johnson on advancing automatic speech recognition systems. Her research is focused on adapting artificial neural networks so that the systems can recognize speech signals from different speakers equally well, regardless of speaking style, and applying her methods to audio-visual speech recognition. 

Yu is working with ECE ILLINOIS Professor Thomas S Huang, Maybelle Leland Swanlund Endowed Chair Emeritus, on research in machine perception, generative models, and high performance computing. His current work involves exploring deep generative models for content creation, and dynamic and efficient deep neural networks for edge devices.

Check out the full list of award recipients on the Beckman site.