Congratulations to Genevieve Starke and Neha Thomas, who have earned prestigious fellowship awards through the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP). This program recognizes outstanding graduate student researchers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, providing the 2,000 awardees with three years of financial support.
The oldest graduate fellowship of its kind, the highly competitive 2018 NSF GFRP program recruits high-potential, early-career scientists and engineers from across the nation. Starke and Thomas were selected from more than 12,000 applicants.
Genevieve Starke:
Starke is a first-year PhD student who is co-advised by Charles Meneveau, Louis M. Sardella Professor in Mechanical Engineering, and Dennice Gayme, Carol Croft Linde Faculty Scholar and assistant professor of mechanical engineering. She is pursuing an interdisciplinary track that combines fluid dynamics and controls to develop wind farm controllers. Her current project is using analytical models to predict the future behavior of the farm to enable dynamic control of the power output of the wind farm, with the end goal of enabling wind farms to be integrated more fully into the power grid.
Neha Thomas:
Thomas is a first-year PhD student in the lab of Jeremy Brown, John C. Malone Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering. She is developing an experimental test bed to compare several types of haptic modalities, including force feedback and vibrotactile feedback, for upper-limb prosthetic devices. The goal of her research is to elucidate better tactile feedback mechanisms for myoelectric prostheses and understand how users integrate haptic feedback to control such devices.