Personal Mention

Maxwell Wang, a M.D./Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh, is one of 16 researchers nationwide to receive the prestigious Hertz Fellowship. The Fannie and John Hertz Foundation selected the recipients from more than 800 applicants from 24 universities across the U.S. Hertz Fellows receive up to five years of research funding, giving them the freedom to pursue innovative ideas. At CMU, Wang is studying machine learning and neuroscience, working with mentors Avniel Ghuman, Max G'Sell and Rob Kass. In his current work, he is conducting research to understand how brain networks change during neuro-interventions, such as deep brain stimulation, and to link these changes to endpoints such as symptom improvement and adverse side-effect profiles. He plans to use the funding to further explore how brain functioning is assessed. "One of the biggest advantages of this community is that people come from so many different backgrounds. You have scientists, engineers, clinicians, data scientists — the brain is where all of these fields come together, and where we can make something truly amazing happen," Wang said. Find out more.

Isabel Yoon is the recipient of this year’s Dr. J. Paul Fugassi and Linda E. Monteverde Award, which recognizes the Mellon College of Science’s graduating female senior with the greatest academic achievement and professional promise. Yoon, who majors in neuroscience and creative writing, has been a dedicated student, talented researcher and an active leader and volunteer both on and off campus. She has mastered advanced biology and neuroscience courses, earning an impressive 4.0 QPA for all semesters. In recognition of her academic achievements, Yoon has been selected as an Andrew Carnegie Society Scholar and inducted early into Phi Beta Kappa and Nu Rho Psi, the National Honor Society for Neuroscience. She is equally accomplished for her writing talent. This year, she won second place in the poetry category in Carnegie Mellon’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day Writing Awards and was invited to speak on NPR’s The Confluence in the episode “How Writing Breaks Barriers in the Name of MLK.”  Find out more.

Phillip Gibbons, a professor in the Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering departments, will receive the Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award from the Association for Computing Machinery. Gibbons will share the award with Noga Alon of Princeton University and Tel Aviv University, Yossi Matias of Google and Tel Aviv University and Mario Szegedy of Rutgers University. The award recognizes them for their seminal work on the foundations of streaming algorithms and their application to large-scale analytics. In a series of papers published in the late 1990s, Gibbons and his colleagues pioneered a framework for algorithmic treatment of streaming massive datasets, the ACM said. Their algorithms remain the core approach for streaming big data and constitute an entire subarea of the field of algorithms. The concepts they introduced are routinely used in a variety of data analysis tasks in databases, network monitoring, usage analytics in internet products, natural language processing and machine learning. Find out more.