Eleven PhD students at the University of Minnesota have been awarded PhD Graduate Assistantships through UMII. These awards are made to grad students involved in research at the intersection of informatics and any of the five MnDRIVE (Robotics; Global Food; Environment; Brain Conditions; and Cancer Clinical Trials).

The awardees are:

Sai Sanjay Balaji

  • Project title: Graph convolution network (GCN) for seizure onset zone identification from iEEG
  • MnDRIVE area: Brain Conditions

Mai Beauclaire

  • Project title: The importance of microbial signaling for communities and other microorganisms
  • MnDRIVE area: Global Food; Environment

Michael Burns

  • Project title: Developing tools to predictively assess masa quality through machine learning and computer vision
  • MnDRIVE area: Global Food

Sze Kwan Cheah

  • Project title: In-flight data-driven robust control of hypersonic vehicle for autonomous flight testing
  • MnDRIVE area: Robotics

Leslie Day

  • Project title: Improving anaerobic digestion through bioinformatics-based enhancement of methanogenesis
  • MnDRIVE area: Environment

Xibai Lou

  • Project title: Object rearrangement with hetero-graph neural networks
  • MnDRIVE area: Robotics

Amanda Patsis

  • Project title: Metagenome mining to inform bioremediation: Elucidating the impact of microbial metabolism on the transport fate of sulfur in Minnesota groundwater
  • MnDRIVE area: Environment

Nipun Perera

  • Project title: Optimizing TMS coil placement for targeting dorsolateral prefrontal cortex
  • MnDRIVE area: Brain Conditions

Angela Ricono

  • Project title: Leveraging time of day transcriptional networks with high resolution metabolomics to predict sulfur dynamics in a diverse specialty crop
  • MnDRIVE area: Global Food

Nicole Walker

  • Project title: Breaking the mold: Leveraging additive manufacturing to improve footwear options for prosthesis users
  • MnDRIVE area: Robotics

Karianne Sretavan Wong

  • Project title: Developing patient-specific biophysical models of ventral capsule/ventral striatum deep brain stimulation for treating obsessive-compulsive disorder
  • MnDRIVE area: Brain Conditions
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