Graduate School Newsblog

Author: Mary Stevens

Doctoral Finishing Fellowship Spring 2019 Recipient -Sakineh Yazdanparast

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Sakineh Yazdanparast
Electrical Engineering

I am honored and grateful to be the recipient of the doctoral finishing fellowship .    I started my graduate study in the summer of 2014   at Michigan Technological University .

My dissertation investigates novel solution  in the area of over/non- overlapping  clustering and community detection in social network graphs, localization of mobile sensor network, big data in the field of machine learning, and computational intelligence.

I am thankful to my Master and PhD advisor, Professor Timothy C.Havens for his support and encouragement in my work. I can’t thanks him enough for everything he is doing for his research team. I could not have imagined having a better advisor and mentor for my Ph.D study. I  am also very grateful to the ECE Department for their support – especially Department Head, Prof.Daniel R. Fuhrmann who has supported me as a PhD student and as a MOM of 2 years old.

A Heartfelt thanks to all supportive wonderful MTU members , Alumni and donors.

I would like to express my sincere thanks to the Graduate School committee, specifically Dr.  Debra Charlesworth for providing me with this financial support. This fellowship allows me to focus on my dissertation and complete my PhD degree on time.  Their support has provided me with an incredible opportunity to accomplish my goals. It is truly an honor and privilege to have this support.

Finally, MTU for me is so much more than a university; it is a community that I truly feel a part of, a family and a real home, especially for international students. I feel so proud to be an MTU student.

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Doctoral Finishing Fellowship Spring 2019 Recipient – Jinlin Zhang

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Jinlin Zhang
Physics

I am a PhD candidate working with Dr. Jae Yong Suh and Dr. Yoke Khin Yap in the Physics Department. I joined Michigan Tech in summer of 2015 after finishing my master’s degree from Lanzhou University, China. My research interests lie in linear and nonlinear optical properties of low dimensional materials including novel metallic films and transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs), which are promising for applications in nanophotonic and nanoelectric devices. I do fabrication, characterization and simulation of these materials. I am also interested in building setups for detecting optical properties of materials. My long-term goal is to pursue an academic career in optical and materials physics, extending what I have learned from Michigan Tech. I am passionate about teaching as well and have more than three years of experience of PH1200 lab as an instructor in Michigan Tech.

I would like to thank Graduate School for granting me the Finishing Fellowship. It allows me time to write my dissertation, defend my thesis and graduate with a doctoral degree. Meanwhile, I am thankful for Dr. Jae Yong Suh and Dr. Yoke Khin Yap for their guidance, and the group members who have helped me during research work as well. I am also grateful to the department chair, Ravindra Pandey, and the Physics Department for their support.

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Dean’s Award for Outstanding Scholar Award – Fall 2018 Recipients

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Congratulations! Outstanding Scholar Award Fall 2018 Recipients

Gina Roose (Accounting MS)
Shuaidong Zhao (Civil and Environmental Engineering PhD)
Priscilla Addison(Geological Engineering PhD)
Sampath Kumar Reddy Boyapally (Mechanical Engineering MS)
Rahul Jitendra Thakkar (Mechanical Engineering MS)
Nikhil Appasaheb Shinde(Mechanical Engineering MS)
Mitchel Timm (Mechanical Engineering MS)
Xinyu Ye (Environmental Engineering PhD)
Janarjan Bhandari (Atmospheric Science PhD)
Mingxi Fang (Chemistry PhD)
John Barnett (Environmental and Energy Policy PhD)
Dolendra Karki (Physics PhD)

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Dean’s Award for Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Award – Fall 2018 Recipients

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Congratulations! Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Award Fall 2018 Recipients

Dongdong Ge (Civil and Environmental Engineering PhD)
Mohammadhossein Sadeghiamirshahidi (Civil and Environmental Engineering PhD)
Aaron Krieg (Chemical Engineering PhD)
Brandi Petryk (Geology MS)
Christa Meingast (Environmental Engineering PhD)
Luke Jurmu (Mechanical Engineering-Engineering Mechanics PhD)
Mingyang Li (Mechanical Engineering-Engineering Mechanics PhD)
Catherine Tislar (Applied Cognitive Science and Human Factors PhD)
Vagarshak Begoyan (Chemistry PhD)
Sun Nguyen (Environmental and Energy Policy MS)
Jacob Blazejewski (Mathematical Sciences PhD)
Nicholas Videtich (Physics MS)

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Doctoral Finishing Fellowship Fall 2018 Recipient – Long Zhang

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Long Zhang
Chemical Engineering

I am a Ph.D. student in Chemical Engineering Department, and this is my fourth year. My research focuses on the dephosphorization from iron ore, particularly goethitic iron ore. I have been working with Dr. Tim Eisele on this project since fall 2014. By applying both bacterial and chemical leaching methods, we are able to remove about 95% of the phosphorus from the ore making the ore successfully meet the industrial standard.

I would like to express my deepest gratitude to the Graduate School for the financial support, which allows me to focus entirely on the completion of my final dissertation. I also want to thank Dr. Eisele for his constant support throughout my entire graduate school studies.

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Doctoral Finishing Fellowship Fall 2018 Recipient -Sanaz Habibi

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Sanaz Habibi
Chemical Engineering

I joined Michigan Tech as a Ph.D. student in September 2014. Since January 2015, I have been working as a graduate research assistant at Medical micro-Device Engineering Research Lab. (M.D.-ERL). My research focuses on developing and optimizing reliable low-cost point of care tools for rapid and quantitative disease diagnosis.

I want to express my gratitude to Graduate School for providing me the Finishing Fellowship. This fellowship gave me the opportunity to put my entire focus on completing my dissertation. I would also like to thank my Ph.D. advisor Prof. Minerick for her constant support and encouragement.

 

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Doctoral Finishing Fellowship Fall 2018 Recipient – Jingyuan Wang

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Jingyuan Wang
Electrical Engineering

My research assistant position at Michigan Tech gives me an opportunity to not only work hard but also to work smart and efficiently towards my goals. I feel satisfaction and pride when helping and as a member of my research group. For my PhD research, I am working on demand response, optimal power flow, integration of distributed energy resources, improving computational performances on large-scale power grids with decentralized approaches, and developing Hardware-in-the-Loop simulation on large-scale transmission and distribution systems with Opal-RT, GAMS and Raspberry Pi server.

As a teaching assistant for two years in the past, I have learned that I should not only lead students and help them with problems, but also encourage and motivate them through open communication. By doing this, students show great enthusiasm for their study, which I find incredibly rewarding. Also, as a member of Society of Women Engineers (SWE), I communicate with female engineering alumni from Michigan Tech and learn a lot from them, such as how to balance life, work and family, and how to successfully deal with the issues that I will encounter as a female engineer in the future.
I would like to thank the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and the Graduate School for funding my academic endeavor. I would like to thank my PhD advisor, Dr. Sumit Paudyal, for supporting me in the past five years. I appreciated every single insightful discussion about my research with him and every single piece of suggestion that he ever gave me.
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Doctoral Finishing Fellowship Fall 2018 Recipient – Priscilla Addison

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Priscilla Addison
Geological Engineering

My interest in engineering started in childish defiance of wanting to prove to majority of the people I came across that girls can be engineers too, and pretty great ones at that! But thankfully it ended up being something I enjoyed immensely. My personality is more logical than emotional, so in school I found myself gravitating towards the Math and Physics subjects because of the structure in them. I enjoy that these subjects can help give the breakdown of why and how most things work. During my undergrad, I majored in civil engineering but got more interested in the geotecthnical/geological aspect of the discipline because of the encompassing nature of this subfield. I like the fact that it puts me in the heart of basically everything of the built environment since geological engineering deals with virtually everything that touches the earth! In my current role as a PhD candidate, I have been developing predictive models to isolate locations in the western US that are vulnerable to debris flows occurrences after wildfires. A recent model has been able to predict 8 out of 10 of these disastrous locations, which is a great improvement on the 4 out of 10 that an earlier model was predicting a couple years ago. This makes me so happy because it is a great step towards mitigating/ preventing the devastations usually associated with these events.

Throughout my academic career, I have been so lucky to have met so many wonderful people, especially my advisor, Dr. Oommen, who has been nothing short of supportive through all the highs and lows of this wringer of a grad school journey. He truly is amazing! I am also very thankful to the Graduate School for this award of Finishing Fellowship which is making it possible for me to fully concentrate on writing my dissertation and defending it without worrying about finances anymore. Medaase— this means “thank you” in my native language, Twi.

 

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