Johns Hopkins University will serve as the home of 20 NSF Graduate Research Fellows—outstanding graduate students in science, technology, engineering, or math fields who have been recognized by the National Science Foundation.
The NSF Graduate Research Fellows program is the oldest graduate fellowship of its kind. Fellows receive three years of financial support in the form of an annual stipend of $34,000 and a $12,000 cost of education allowance for tuition and fees paid to the institution. They have opportunities for international research and professional development, and have the freedom to conduct their own research. Overall, the NSF selected 2,076 Graduate Research Fellows this year.
The 2020 NSF Graduate Research Fellows who will conduct their research in the Johns Hopkins Department of Biomedical Engineering are:
Haley Abramson is a PhD student in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. She graduated with a BS in computer science and molecular biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2019.
Tiffany Chu has developed a platform to quantify cell proliferation within two- and three-dimensional environments as a student in JHU’s biomedical engineering program. Her NSF fellowship will build on that work to solve a key roadblock to current cell invasion studies.
Julia Costacurta is a senior majoring in biomedical engineering, mathematics, applied mathematics and statistics. Her research, conducted in the Neuromedical Control Systems Lab of the Johns Hopkins Department of Biomedical Engineering, has focused on improving sensory feedback for prosthesis users.
Dylan Hirsch graduated with a degree in biomedical engineering in 2018. Since then, he has worked on immune phenotyping data from patients with rare immune diseases at the National Institute of Health. He plans to develop methods to improve modeling and simulation of biomolecular interactions and circuits.
Benjamin Pedigo is a second-year PhD student in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and a co-developer of GraSPy, an open-source package for statistical analysis. His work focuses on using statistical and computational techniques to help understand nanoscale connectomes.
Brenda Yang is a first-year PhD student studying biomedical engineering. A member of the Translational Tissue Engineering Center, she investigates the role of the microbiome in response to biomaterials and wound healing.