Current Scholars
ARCS Foundation Pittsburgh is honored to present awards to outstanding scholars chosen by the scholar selection committee at Carnegie Mellon University and University of Pittsburgh. A Pittsburgh Chapter ARCS Scholar receives $15,000 in support, payable over three years at $5,000 per year, or until the completion of his or her doctoral degree, whichever comes sooner, provided the scholar maintains established criteria for continuation.
The Carroll-Marshall Chapter Named Award
University of Pittsburgh
Swanson School of Engineering
Personal:
Research: Building new high density arrays of implantable neural probes for monitoring multi-modal (i.e. chemical and electrical) neural activity over chronic timescales.
The Elliott-Hotopp Chapter Named Award
University of Pittsburgh
School of Medicine
Personal: I enjoy running, yoga, playing with dogs, and trying different tea drinks at coffee shops. I am also new to Pittsburgh and look forward to living in a traditional, East Coast city for the first time.
Research: I have a broad interest in the field of reproductive biology and hope to explore new areas within the male and female reproductive systems during my first-year rotations.
The Patross- Pittsburgh Chapter Award
Carnegie Mellon University
Mellon College of Science
Personal:
Research: Mass Spectrometry with environmental applications
The Pittsburgh Chapter Award
University of Pittsburgh
School of Nursing
Personal: Alice is a Pittsburgh native who lives in Point Breeze with her spouse and two small children.
Research: Alice is a midwife and PhD student at the University of Pittsburgh School of Nursing. She studies maternal morbidity in the postpartum period, and the effect of policy change on maternal outcomes. Her dissertation research is measuring the effect of Medicaid expansion in Pennsylvania on maternal health outcomes. She is a pre-doctoral fellow in the SON Technology T32 Grant, designing an algorithm to help clinicians predict poor maternal health outcomes. She recently won the PhD Award from the Nightingale Awards of Pennsylvania.
The Corey-Zawadzki Chapter Named Award
Carnegie Mellon University
School of Computer Science, Institute of Software Research
Personal: Exercising, reading, playing piano, watching TV and playing video games
Research: Using AI machine learning for art and music synthesis and analysis, examining and mitigating algorithmic bias, and using AI and machine learning to detect and ameliorate mental health issues like anxiety and depression.
The Heppner-Thier-Stover Named Award
Carnegie Mellon University
Electrical and Computer Engineering Department
Personal: In those few moments when he is not working, he plays the piano and is interested in urban design and architecture.
Research: Plans to apply Machine Learning to embedded applications, and develop new methods to better suit embedded applications.
The Nimick Forbesway Foundation Named Award
Carnegie Mellon University
College of Engineering
Civil and Environmental Engineering Department
Personal: In her spare time she enjoys performing in musicals, hiking, and spending time with her two cats. She also used to be a volunteer softball coach during undergrad.
Research: Katherine plans to study reduced-complexity air quality models and their applications.
The Pittsburgh Chapter Award
Carnegie Mellon University
Mellon College of Science
Personal: Carleen has a hobby research career in women's hockey analytics. For anyone familiar with Moneyball, she is attempting to do a similar thing with women's hockey. She also loves cycling, sewing, road tripping, and checking out unique food spots.
Research: Currently, she is most interested in using machine learning to improve the amount of detail cosmological simulations give us and to speed up their run times.
The Pittsburgh Chapter Award
University of Pittsburgh
School of Nursing
Personal:
Research: From my personal experience, I see a need for more research in the first year postpartum and am particularly interested in exploring the implementation of a technology-based postpartum peer support group.
The Martin-Testoni Named Award
University of Pittsburgh
Department of Microbiology and Immunology
Research: Olivia is a MD/PhD student and plans on becoming a physician scientist neonatologist. She has a long-standing interest in neonatal infections and became intrigued by the fact that human metapneumovirus (HMPV) causes severe disease in the very young and the very old.
Personal: She is originally from Pittsburgh and also went to University of Pittsburgh for undergraduate studies. She loves Pittsburgh as a city and the vast opportunities for research at UPMC Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh.
The Pittsburgh Chapter Award
Carnegie Mellon University
School of Computer Science, Machine Learning Department
Personal: In his spare time, he enjoys playing tennis and soccer. He also enjoys playing the viola.
Research: He expects to pursue research in statistical machine learning and machine learning with limited labeled data.
The Bruschi-Hofman-Verghis Named Award
University of Pittsburgh
School of Medicine
Personal: In my spare time, I enjoy reading, playing the piano, fitness, and cooking. I also love traveling to new places. I’m new to Pittsburgh so I’m excited to explore the city!
Research: I’m interested in studying mechanisms of anti-tumor immune activation, with the goal of applying that understanding to the development of new immunotherapies for cancer. The knowledge that the experiments I perform in the lab today may contribute to better therapies tomorrow is what motivates me.
The Catharine and John Ryan ARCS Pittsburgh Endowed Scholar Award
Carnegie Mellon University
Mellon College of Science, Biological Sciences Department
Personal: In my spare time, I like doing art and going to nature trails.
Research: Alexa plans to research intracellular trafficking.
The Gookin Family Foundation ARCS Pittsburgh Endowed Scholar Award
Carnegie Mellon University
Mellon College of Science, Mathematics Department
Personal:
Research: She expects her research interests at Carnegie Mellon to lie in mathematical logic and set theory.
The Pittsburgh Chapter Award
Carnegie Mellon University
School of Computer Science, Human Computer Interaction Institute
Personal:
Research:
The Jeanne B. and Richard F. Berdik ARCS Pittsburgh Endowed Award
Carnegie Mellon University
School of Computer Science, Department of Machine Learning
Personal: In my free time, I enjoy playing tennis and lifting.
Research: I am interested in building machine learning models that allow robots to adapt their behavior to a wide range of unfamiliar situations. I hope to scale up current approaches to robot learning, so that intelligent agents can achieve stronger generalization ability and be more reliably deployed in the real world.
Research: My research interests involve elucidating the communication between the immune and enteric nervous system and how both contribute to promote protection against gastrointestinal pathogens. The findings of my research have the potential to enhance oral vaccine designs leading to better protection in children from low- and middle-income countries.
The Pittsburgh Chapter Award
University of Pittsburgh
Swanson School of Engineering, Bioengineering Department
Personal: In my free time, I like to skateboard and work on creative projects to help grow the community of non-traditional skateboarders in Pittsburgh.
Research: My research focuses on the development of neural interfaces that allow us to send and receive signals to and from the brain. I aim to develop novel tools to allow us to directly observe and understand the biological phenomenon occurring at the tissue-device interface.
Personal: In my free time, I enjoy playing my violin named Galileo as well as painting using watercolors.
Mellon College of Science, Biological Sciences Department
Research:
Personal: In my free time, I enjoy gardening, painting, and playing the violin. I also love to explore parks and spend time in nature.
Research: My undergraduate research project involved reconstructing marine to freshwater transitions in modern, tropical lake sediment using geochemical proxies. The results showed a possible connection to early human activity in the study region, which made me interested in studying and connecting paleoclimate records to modern climate change and anthropogenic influence in my graduate research. In a warming world where freshwater resources are vital, reconstructions of paleoclimate and early human influence from biogeochemical alterations of lake sediment can provide insight into how climate change can impact society and vice versa.
The Fleischner-ARCS Pittsburgh Member Endowed Award
Carnegie Mellow University
College of Engineering, Material Science and Engineering
Research: Computational modeling of Polymer Systems
The Pittsburgh Chapter Award
Carnegie Mellon University
School of Computer Science, Softward Engineering
Research: Data visualization and data analysis focusing on improving visual communication in learning materials.
The Pittsburgh Chapter Award
University of Pittsburgh
Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences
Department of Geology and Environmental Science
Research: Continental drifts in Taiwan and the subduction that created the islands in the region.
The ARCS Pittsburgh Scholar Endowment in Memory of Jack and Gen Esgar
Carnegie Mellon University
Mellon College of Science
Mathematical Sciences
Research:
The Dunn Pittsburgh Chapter Award
University of Pittsburgh
School of Medicine, Microbiology and Immunology
Research: Undertsanding interactions between disease-causing organisms and immune response