We’ve received great news for three BioRobotics lab affiliated students who each received a new fellowship this week! Two students, EE graduate student Katherine Pratt and undergrad alum Andrew Hill, each received a NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Margaret Thompson, an EE graduate student, received the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship. Congratulations to all three of them!
Current BRL graduate student Margaret Thompson graduated in 2014 from Harvey Mudd College with a degree in engineering. Her current work with Professor Chizeck in the BioRobotics Lab is designing novel brain-computer interface (BCI) platforms using long-term, fully implanted deep brain stimulation (DBS) electrodes which were originally designed to treat movement disorders such as Parkinson’s disease and essential tremor. Read more about her work here.
Katherine Pratt graduated in 2008 from MIT with a degree in aerospace engineering. She worked at Blue Origin in systems engineering prior to entering active duty as an officer in the US Air Force. Most of her service was spent at Edwards AFB as a member of the operational test team for the F-35; she concentrated on pilot systems and cockpit integration. After leaving the military, she worked with Adrian KC Lee at UW (LABS^N), running spatio-temporal behavioral, EEG, and M/EEG experiments. For the past academic year she has been a participant in the NSF Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering’s program that facilitates veterans returning to academia. Her current work with Professor Chizeck is in the BioRobotics Lab is developing touchscreen control using EMG and other neural signals for individuals without sufficient finger dexterity to operate smart phones, tablets and similar devices.
Andrew Hill is a UW Bioengineering undergraduate alumni. He worked in the Biorobotics Lab from 2010 to 2012, where he did a year long senior capstone design project under the supervision of Professors Chizeck and Hannaford. After graduating in 2012, he then worked as an engineer at Tekscan, Inc. for one year followed by another year as a genomics researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital/Broad Institute in Boston, returning to UW in 2014 as a graduate student in Genome Sciences.
Read more about the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program here.
Last week, BRL researchers Jeffrey Herron, Maggie Thompson, Brady Houston, and Prof. Howard Chizeck attended the third annual DBS Think Tank in Orlando, Florida. Our collaborator Dr. Andrew Ko from the UW Medical Center also joined us in this trip to discuss cutting edge research into improving DBS therapy. Howard Chizeck presented our ongoing work to build engineering tools to enable research into closed-loop and volitional control of DBS therapy. We aim to use these tools collaboratively to accelerate development of advanced DBS systems across multiple institutions. Thank you to the organizers for putting together such a great event! 
awarded the UW’s Society for Women Engineers Outstanding Female Award for 2015! The award is given to an outstanding graduate student and undergraduate annually. Congratulations Tamara!
