Six ChemBE students win NSF GRFP award

Six students from the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering were named recipients of the Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) award presented by the National Science Foundation (NSF). The fellowship recognizes outstanding students who are or will be pursuing graduate studies in STEM fields. The fellowship provides financial support and a stipend for three years. Of the six winners, three are current seniors, one is a current PhD candidate, and two are former Johns Hopkins undergraduates pursuing graduate studies at other institutions.

The winners:

• Stephanie Brown is a senior in the Carsten Prasse Lab (Department of Environmental Health and Engineering) studying the release of chemical additives from naturally weathered plastic water bottles and the Howard Fairbrother Lab (Department of Chemistry) working on a project to develop an analytical method to track microplastics in environmental systems.
• Michael Chungyoun is a second year PhD student in the Jeffrey Gray Lab, currently working at the intersection of antibody engineering and deep learning, developing models to design and optimize therapeutic antibody candidates.
• Mia Grahn is a senior conducting digital pathology research under Ashley Kiemen and Denis Wirtz (Institute for NanoBioTechnology), focusing on three dimensionally reconstructing pancreas tissue to better understand the heterogeneous morphological changes associated with the onset of Type 1 Diabetes and pancreatic cancer.
• Anirudh Hari worked in the June Wicks Lab (Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute) and is currently a PhD candidate at Stanford University’s Department of Materials Science studying the limits of X-ray diffraction interpretation at extreme conditions.
• Maram Naji is currently a PhD student in the Julius B. Lucks Lab for RNA Engineering at Northwestern University’s Center for Synthetic Biology, where she is continuing work begun in the Eric Nuermberger Lab at the Johns Hopkins Center for Tuberculosis Research, studying antibiotic combinations to shorten the treatment timeline of tuberculosis and other mycobacterial infections.
• Xin (Jason) Zhang is a senior working in the Brandon Bukowski Lab and Tyrel McQueen Lab (Department of Chemistry) studying ways to discover, synthesize, and characterize next-generation quantum materials for spintronic applications through simultaneous experimental and computational approaches.