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 Pittsburgh Chapter Award
University of Pittsburgh
Center for Neuroscience (CNUP)
Personal: I am a Christian and deeply rooted in faith. I enjoy playing Basketball, listening to music, watching and reading Sci Fi & Marvel, and motivating others.
Research: Neurodegenerative diseases and environmental factors that accelerate neurodegeneration
The Sokolow-Zelkovic Award
University of Pittsburgh
School of Medicine
Interdisciplinary Biomedical Graduate Program
Personal: I enjoy playing soccer and basketball, hanging out with friends, and watching sports
Research: I have a deep interest in neuropathology and neuropharmacology, in particular the mechanisms underlying neurodegeneration in Alzheimer's disease. In my current rotation, I am studying amyloid-beta aggregates and their role in neurotoxicity.
The Unkovic-Pittsburgh Chapter Award
Carnegie Mellon University
Mechanical Engineering
Nanotechnology Department
Personal: Fitness, Hiking, Meditation, Trying new and delicious food, Reading science fiction/fantasy novels, Playing the guitar/ukulele, Travel
Research: The development of a hybrid top-down, bottom-up manufacturing process for microswimmers using DNA origami.
The Pittsburgh Chapter Award
Carnegie Mellon University
School of Computer Science
Computational Biology Department
Personal: I enjoy playing basketball, traveling, and playing video games.
Research: I am interested in developing statistical machine learning methods for solving key problems in computational genomics and healthcare.
The Dunn-Loeber-Townsend Award
University of Pittsburgh
Swanson School of Engineering
Department of Bioengineering
Personal: I was a collegiate track and field athlete during my undergraduate career, and am still very interested in the sport. I am involved in coaching youth athletes and still enjoy running and weight training myself. I also love playing the piano and reading.
Research: I am studying the role of balance control in locomotion in daily life by using biomechanical models. My research is mainly focusing on aging populations and those with balance disorders.
The Crawford-Stockman Member Scholar Endowment Award
University of Pittsburgh
School of Nursing
Personal: I love to ski, hike and watch scary movies in my spare time. I have just recently moved to Pittsburgh so I also enjoy exploring new parts of the city.
Research: I am currently working as a Graduate Student Researcher under Dr. Cecelia Yates. In this lab we are studying the role of chemokine modulation in the extracellular matrix of patients with Scleroderma in order to study their effects on fibrosis and tissue remodeling. I plan to study the fibrosis pathway involved with pressure ulcer formation in order adults in order to investigate routes of prevention.
The Jewish Healthcare Foundation
University of Pittsburgh
School of Nursing
Personal: I enjoy working in critical care, and in my free time I like to bake, play the viola and go on hikes.
Research: Mobile health and palliative care integration in heart failure self-management
The Fleischner-ARCS Pittsburgh Member Endowed Award
Carnegie Mellon University
Engineering and Public Policy
Carnegie Institute of Technology
Personal: I enjoy board games, video games, drawing, and writing poetry and short fiction.
Research: I am researching the impacts of recent changes in EPA emissions regulation. In doing so, I want to estimate the impacts of emissions monitoring on plants’ emitting behavior and determine what factors, including organizational characteristics, predict the direction and magnitude of behavior change.
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:
Research: Study racial disparities in maternal morbidity and mortality in the peripartum period, and ways in which technology can be used to bridge gaps in care and connect with communities at high risk for perinatal complications.
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
School of Computer Science
School of Engineering
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.