Beckman Institute awards include three ECE ILLINOIS PhD students

4/28/2017 Corey Blumenthal, ECE ILLINOIS

Andrew John Bower, Ning Xu, and Amit Das will be honored in a ceremony on May 6.

Written by Corey Blumenthal, ECE ILLINOIS

ECE ILLINOIS PhD students [profile:bower3], [profile:ningxu], and [profile:amitdas] are among the nineteen students who will be recognized on May 6 at the 2017 Beckman Institute student awards.

Bower has been named a 2017 Beckman Graduate Fellow. This fellowship will allow him to continue his current research to develop optical imaging technologies for biological and biomedical applications with professors [profile:boppart], [profile:gaol], and [profile:parijat] in the Bioimaging Science and Technology Group.

“My main research goals through the Beckman Fellowship are to develop a video-rate nonlinear fluorescence microscope and to use this system to explore two main applications,” Bower said. “The first is to study the dynamics of cell death induction in cancer cells, which we have previously shown is a highly dynamic metabolic process that cannot be characterized well using the current technology. The other application is to study the metabolic dynamics of neural activity in single cells.”

Xu received the Thomas and Margaret Huang Award for Graduate Research. This award is given annually to graduate students who are conducting research in the Intelligent Systems research theme at Beckman. Xu will work with his adviser, [profile:t-huang1], an ECE research professor on his research project, "Using Deep Learning for Video Object Segmentation."

Das won the Organizational Intelligence and Computational Social Science Award allowing him to pursue his research in the study of social networks and large-scale social systems at Beckman this summer. Das studies speech and language technology including automatic speech recognition (speech to text conversion), gesture recognition, and speech enhancement. He will work with ECE professor [profile:jhasegaw].


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This story was published April 28, 2017.