Current Postdoctoral Fellows: 2009 2008 2007 2006 Carle/Beckman
Jeremy Brooks
Jeremy earned his Ph.D. in Ecology from the University of California, Davis in 2008. He came to the Beckman Institute from Loyola University where he served as an instructor. His research work seeks to understand the individual characteristics and contextual factors that influence attitudes and behaviors related to a variety of environmental issues including climate change.
Nanshu Lu
Nanshu joined the Beckman Institute from Harvard University, where she earned a Ph.D. in the School of Engineering and Applied Science. Her research interest has focused on the mechanics and materials for the integration of hard and soft materials. As a Beckman fellow, she seeks to develop smart, flexible electronic devices by integrating soft active matters into current flex circuit configurations.
David Mayerich
David completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Texas A&M University. While there he helped develop a prototype microscope capable of quickly imaging large three-dimensional tissue samples. His current research goals are to advance methods for reconstruction and visualization of biomedical data in order to provide an unprecedented understanding of anatomy at the sub-cellular level. He plans to focus on creating sub-cellular anatomical models of tissue as well as better ways to process and visualize datasets provided by new microscope techniques.
Nathan Parks
Nathan completed his Ph.D. in the area of Cognitive and Brain Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His research plan concentrates on examining the neural mechanisms of attention, competition, and short-term plasticity within the human visual system. He will use a variety of noninvasive neuro-physiological measures and psychophysical techniques in his investigations.
Edward Wlotko
Eddie earned a Ph.D. from the Brain and Cognition Division of the Department of Psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research explores how the two hemispheres of the brain each serve language functions that are necessary for comprehension. At the Beckman Institute, he uses the event-related optical signal (EROS) to explore the individual and joint contributions of the cerebral hemispheres to language comprehension, and how those contributions change over the lifespan.
Jacob Eisenstein
Jacob is currently a post-doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he is expected to earn his Ph.D. in Computer Science in June of 2008. His research focuses on non-verbal modalities such as gestures that supplement speech. At the Beckman Institute he plans to build computational statistical models of the relationship between gesture, speech, and discourse with the goal of improving natural language understanding.
Agustín Mihi
Agustín received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Seville. His research, focused on increasing the light harvested in Dye Sensitized Solar Cells by coupling Photonic Crystals, was carried out at the Institute of Materials Science of Seville (Spain). At the Beckman Institute, Agustín is deepening the understanding of the effect of optical design on the efficiency of photoelectrochemical processes and extending the application of these concepts to other types of photonic structures.
Amy Shih
Amy completed her Ph.D. in Biophysics and Computational Biology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in March, 2008. Her research is focused on the biophysical characterizations of health-relevant biomolecules. During her time as a Beckman Institute Fellow, she is using advanced computational modeling techniques to study HDLs and cytochrome P450s.
Joel Voss
Joel received his Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Northwestern University in 2007. He currently studies the biological basis for the distinction between conscious and non-conscious expressions of memory as well as the role that volition plays in memory processes that evolve over time, such as navigation of novel environments.
Derek Hoiem
Derek received his Ph.D. in Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University. While a Beckman Fellow his research focused on computer vision with an emphasis on learning appearance models and image-based scene understanding. Derek has departed the Fellows program and is now an assistant professor in Computer Science.
Zhi Jiang
Zhi received his Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from Purdue University. His research interests include ultrafast optics, biomedical optics and fiber optics. At Beckman he is working on optical imaging, especially nonlinear microscopy, for biomedical applications.
Séverine Lepage
Séverine Lepage earned her Ph.D. in Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Liège, Belgium. She departed the Beckman Institute in August of 2008.
Jongseung Yoon
Jongseung received his Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research interests lie in exploiting soft and hybrid composite materials, combining soft matter with inorganics such that their optical, electrical, and mechanical properties are optimally designed for advanced applications in photonics, electronics, and photovoltaics. At Beckman he has been focused on new approaches for creating low cost and high-performance photovoltaic devices with unusual characteristics, including large area and lightweight construction, mechanical flexibility/stretchability, semi-transparency, and ultrathin-form-factor micro-optic concentrator design.
2006 Fellows (PDF)
Joseph B. Geddes III
Joseph earned his Ph.D. in Engineering Science and Mechanics from the Pennsylvania State University where his work focused on the time-domain optical response of inhomogenous, anisotropic, and nonlinear materials like chiral sculptured thin films to excitation by ultrashort optical pulses. At Beckman he has extended his research in the design and optical interrogation of complex materials. His projects have included analysis of curved photodetector arrays for improved cameras, design of highly nonlinear metal-dielectric composites, and optical pulse shaping for coherent control of Raman microscopy.
Yael Gertner
Yael received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania. Since then she has been working as an experimental psychologist, first as an NRSA fellow, and then as a Beckman Fellow. Her research interests deal with how children acquire words and rules of their native languages and how these processes can be modeled using computational tools. Gertner plans to pursue further research in this area using experimental psycholinguistics and techniques from computational learning theory. She will use the knowledge derived from the experiments to design better learning algorithms that use the same features children use and obtain the same feedback that children obtain.
Ming Hsu
Ming received his Ph.D. in Social Sciences from the California Institute of Technology. He departed the program in August of 2008 to take a faculty position in Economics at Illinois.
Mark Neider
Mark received his Ph.D. from the Department of Psychology at Stony Brook University. His dissertation work examined the role of high level scene factors in modulating visual search performance in realistic scenes. Neider’s goals are two-fold: (1) to understand basic visual behavior in the context of real world tasks, and (2) to apply this knowledge to augment human performance in a variety of “everyday” and not so “everyday” tasks and situations.
Stephanie Rinne
Stephanie received her Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests include the non-traditional nano and microfabrication of functional materials, typically for photonics applications. Stephanie has demonstrated 3D waveguiding of near-IR light using a complete photonic bandgap material. She has also designed 2D diffraction gratings to improve the efficiency of thin film silicon solar cells.
Sarah Brown-Schmidt
Sarah received her Ph.D. from the department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Rochester. Her research focuses on the processes that support language production and language comprehension in interactive, conversational settings. She has two primary lines of research. One line of research investigates how the language processing system represents and processes information about the perspective of other individuals. A second line of research examines how speakers transform pre-linguistic thoughts into speech.
Dirk Walther
Dirk earned his Ph.D. in Computational and Neural Systems at the California Institute of Technology. His thesis was on “Modeling interactions of visual attention and object recognition in human and machine vision.” As a Beckman Fellow, he investigates the neural correlates of natural scene perception; he tries to predict training success in complex cognitive tasks from brain activity; and he continues to model visual and auditory attention.
Carle Foundation Hospital/Beckman Institute Fellow
Michael Walsh
Michael received his Ph.D. in Biological Sciences from Lancaster University in the United Kingdom. As the first-ever Carle Foundation Hospital/Beckman Institute Fellow, his research plan focuses on advancing non-invasive cancer detection methods. His goals include finding ways to use imaging to automate the examination and classification of tissue in order to overcome many of the limitations that exist in current pathology methodologies. This could eventually reduce the time-consuming nature of diagnosis and it could also eliminate the operator bias that can lead to misdiagnosis.