Spotlights

Gregory Zaborski
PhD candidate
I was raised by my Sicilian mother in the small town of Saugerties in upstate New York. I was never …
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Edward Apraku
PhD candidate
Civil & Environmental Engineering
I was born in Kumasi, Ghana, and moved to the U.S. with my parents and older sister when I was 2 …
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Emma Kaeli
PhD candidate
Materials Science and Engineering
When I first started college, someone asked if I wanted to join the Society of Women Engineers, but …
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Skyler St. Pierre
PhD candidate
Mechanical Engineering
I study how we can use neural networks and machine learning to better understand the mechanics of …
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Michael Kwara
PhD candidate
Aeronautics and Astronautics
During the peak of COVID when large gatherings were rare, I joined thousands of people on a beach …
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Neil Band
PhD candidate
Computer Science
I was born in Boston, but I grew up in the Midwest, and lived in Chicago for a while before our …
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Guillem Casadesús Vila
MS ’24
Aeronautics and Astronautics
When I was around 14, NASA landed the Curiosity rover on Mars and it was an aha moment for me …
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Kavya Sreedhar
PhD candidate
Electrical Engineering
I grew up in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, but by the time I was in eighth grade, my family had moved …
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Rachel Huang
PhD candidate
Materials Science and Engineering
I was born in China’s Hunan Province and came to the U.S. alone when I was 17 …
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Simi Aluko
PhD candidate
Civil & Environmental Engineering
My first trip to London opened my mind to the idea that buildings can tell stories …
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Aaron Brown
PhD candidate
Mechanical Engineering
I work in Alison Marsden’s lab, where we study computational modeling of the cardiovascular …
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Nava Haghighi
PhD
Computer Science
I’m a designer by training …
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Aaron Brown
MS ’23
Mechanical Engineering
I think I first became curious about space and science in middle school …
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Christopher Hoyt
PhD
Institute for Computational & Mathematical Engineering
I was born in Salinas, and in those first few weeks I had episodes when I stopped breathing …
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Bianca Jurewicz (Aumann)
M.S., ’23
Mechanical Engineering
My curiosity about engineering has been a part of me since I was a little girl …
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Julia Olivieri
PhD candidate
Institute for Computational & Mathematical Engineering
I never used to think of myself as someone who’d study computer science, and I didn’t think of …
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Christiane Adcock
PhD candidate
Institute for Computational & Mathematical Engineering
I became an engineer to fight climate change …
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Favour Nerrise
Electrical Engineering
I didn’t always have a word for it, but engineering has been part of my life for a long time …
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Abeynaya Gnanasekaran
PhD candidate
Institute for Computational & Mathematical Engineering
I find my PhD work in linear algebra exciting because many problems in many different fields boil …
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Crystal Nattoo
PhD candidate
Electrical Engineering
I knew I loved engineering after taking it as an elective in high school, but I fell in love with …
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Emilie Kono
Bioengineering
One of the most exciting days of my life was when I went to my first university lab in high school …
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Isabel Gallegos
Computer Science
It’s hard to become something you can’t see …
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