Five graduate students at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science — Zachary Ballard, Kelly Connelly, Kenneth Gutierrez, Ariella Machness and Adam Martin — and two alumni at other institutions — Sara Achour and Erik Jue — have received the prestigious Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation.
The fellowship program, which offers three years of financial support, “recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines who are pursuing research-based master’s and doctoral degrees at accredited United States institutions.”
| Sara Achour ’13 (computer science and computational biology) Field: Computer systems and embedded systems Current graduate institution: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Research interests: Programming languages and systems for unreliable and approximate hardware. Other interests include software engineering, program analysis and security. MIT faculty advisor: Martin Rinard UCLA undergraduate advisor: Jens Palsberg |
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| Zachary Ballard Field: Electrical engineering Research interests: Bio-sensing and imaging with flexible plasmonic nano-structures for point-of-care diagnostics. Faculty advisor: Aydogan Ozcan Undergraduate institution: Brown University |
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| Kelly Connelly Field: Mechanical engineering Research interests: In-situ characterization of the eye’s vitreous humor, the gel between the lens and retina, using rheological methods to quantify its viscoelastic behavior. Faculty advisor: Pirouz Kavehpour Undergraduate institution: University of Washington |
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| Kenneth Gutierrez Field: Mechanical engineering Research interests: Artificial haptic intelligence for sensorized robotic and prosthetic hands. Faculty advisor: Veronica Santos Undergraduate institution: UC Irvine |
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| Erik Jue ’14 (bioengineering) Field: Chemical engineering Current graduate Institution: California Institute of Technology Research focus: Diagnostic devices for low-resource settings Caltech faculty advisor: Rustem Ismagilov UCLA faculty advisor: Daniel T. Kamei |
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| Ariella Machness ’14 (chemistry and materials science) Field: Materials science Research focus:Develop mesoporous silicon structures for demonstration in drug delivery and thin film solar cell applications. Faculty advisor: Mark Goorsky |
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| Adam Martin Field: Mechanical engineering Research focus: Novel thermal energy storage to further improve current renewable energy technologies. Faculty advisor: Richard Wirz Undergraduate institution: UC Merced |
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