Kristan Morgan – Mars Foundation Scholar 1st Year Scholar, PhD Candidate
Geography & Environmental Engineering Johns Hopkins University
Research: My research estimates CO2 sources and sinks in the Amazon, using NASA satellite data to model broader tropical South America to understand the environmental levers and knobs that control the contemporary tropical...
Hayden Barry – Forster Family Foundation Scholar 1st Year Scholar, PhD Candidate
Materials Science and Engineering University of Virginia
Research: My research focuses on improving superconductor-insulator-superconductor junctions, which act as tiny, ultra-fast switches that are the building blocks of future quantum computers and advanced sensors. By using a Transmission Electron...
Samuel Allsup – Endowment Scholar 1st Year Scholar, PhD Candidate
Biochemistry and Molecular & Cellular Biology Georgetown University
Research: My research is focused on using viral elements of the human genome to induce cell death in ovarian cancer cells, as well as attracting cells from the immune system to attack...
Kieran Barvenik – Angie Delaney Memorial Scholar 2nd Year Scholar, PhD Candidate
Mechanical Engineering University of Maryland
Research: My research seeks to explore the development of novel soft hemispherical robots, which utilize a flexible hemispherical shell coupled with pneumatic or hydraulic loading to produce a complex “Pac-Man” grasping shape. Because...
Isaac Bilsel – Barbara Luchsinger Memorial Scholar 2nd Year Scholar, PhD Candidate
Computer Engineering George Washington University
Research: Modern large language models use a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) approach to scale to massive sizes by activating only parts of the model at a time. While this reduces computation, it creates complex communication...
Alexander "Sasha" Frolov – Endowment Scholar 2nd Year Scholar, PhD Candidate
Computer Science University of Maryland
Research: My research area is cryptography, which is the mathematical study of secure communication and computation. I am interested in making cryptographic systems faster and more capable. I currently work on Zero-Knowledge Proofs, which...
Clara Stahlmann Roeder O’Connor – MWC Chapter Scholar 1st Year Scholar, PhD candidate
Biology & Biomedical Engineering University of Virginia
Research: My research studies how age and prior social experience affect the perception and response to social environments, focusing on fighting behavior in the long-lived forked fungus beetle, including how...
Nicole Crumpler – Michelle & Julian Francis Scholar 1st Year Scholar, PhD candidate
Physics and Astronomy Johns Hopkins University
Research: My research combines theoretical physics and observational astronomy to explore unknown physics, such as dark matter and quantum gravity, by using black hole mergers and white dwarf stars to search...
Isaac Bilsel – MWC Chapter Scholar 1st Year Scholar, PhD candidate
Electrical & Computer Engineering George Washington University
Research: To accelerate graph neural network inference, my work analyzes communication bottlenecks arising from high-degree graph vertices and introduces a novel on-chip network to efficiently support their collective communication patterns.
Research: My research focuses on developing a flexible skin patch that uses microfabricated heaters for the creation of micropores in the skin, enabling painless and non-intrusive drug delivery directly into the body.
