Four BME students receive NSF Graduate Research Fellowships

Congratulations to our BME students!

NSF GRFP winners Indie Rice, William Wang, Brooke Huisman, and Tyler Gerhardson

U-M Biomedical Engineering had four National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship award winners in 2017.

Indie Rice is an undergraduate senior working in Dr. Tim Bruns’ Peripheral Neural Engineering and Urodynamics Lab researching peripheral neural modulation for female sexual dysfunction. In graduate school, Rice plans to research neural prosthetic control systems for cognitive disorders.

William Wang is a PhD student in Dr. Brendon Baker’s Engineered Microenvironments and Mechanobiology Lab. William’s aim is to expose how extracellular matrix mechanics and structures regulate the formation of blood vessels. He hopes to do this by combining synthetic biomaterials with microfabrication techniques to design a blood vessel-on-a-chip platform which can be used in disease modeling, drug screening, and regenerative medicine.

Brooke Huisman is a senior in the BS program currently conducting research in Dr. Sundeep Kalantry’s, U-M Medical School based, epigenetics lab. Brooke is specifically studying the phenomenon of X-chromosome inactivation.

Tyler Gerhardson is a PhD student working in Dr. Zhen Xu’s Image-Guided Ultrasound Therapy Lab. Gerhardson is working to develop applications of focused ultrasound (histotripsy) for minimally invasive therapies through the skull.