COE Research Expo Displays Promising Work of PhD Students

The College of Engineering held a research expo to highlight the work of PhD students. Participants presented their research to a panel of judges and gained critical presentation and communication skills. They also displayed their research during the poster showcase and students were recognized with awards.


The College of Engineering hosted its sixth annual COE Research Expo Feb. 26 in the Curry Student Center Ballroom to give PhD students the opportunity to showcase their dedication to their research projects. Around 65 participants attended to display their projects, as well as several COE faculty members, many of whom served as judges for the contest. The range of topics covered by the research projects spanned  all COE departments.


The expo began with a private showcase for the judges to learn more about each project. Students who presented each project explained their research procedures and outcomes and fielded questions from the judges. Afterwards, the judges took time to deliberate and decide on the winners. During this time, the expo was opened to all attendees to give them a chance to learn about each project. Towards the end of the expo, Gregory Abowd, dean of the College of Engineering, arrived to announce the winners. Five winners each were selected for two categories: the Judges Award and the Audience Choice Award. The recipients of each award and their projects are listed below.

Judges Award:

  • Shalom Fadullon, ChE, “Kinetic Modeling of the Impact of Dietary Fatty acid Uptake on the Absorption of Poorly Water-Soluble Drugs”
  • Maria Tsampazi, ECE, “PandORA: Automated Design and Large-scale Evaluation of Deep Reinforcement Learning Agents for Open RAN”
  • Sana Heydarian, ChE, “Demonstration of a Batch Electrochemical System for Phosphorus Recovery from a Real Municipal Wastewater Recycle Stream”
  • Catherine Karpova, BioE, “Development of 3D Cardiovascular Tissue with Embedded Vascular Network Through Co-Differentiation of hPSCs”
  • Shaobo Yang, BioE, “Nonpathogenic E. coli engineered to surface display human cytokines for enhanced immunotherapy”

Audience Choice Award:

  • Vincent Ton, MIE, “Optimizing Neuromechanical Simulations of Different Ankle-Foot Orthosis Roll-Over Shapes for Enhanced Gait Patterns”
  • Farnaz Feyli, MIE, “Comparative Analysis of Brain Tissue Motion in Chiari Malformation I and Healthy Controls: Insights from Dense MRI”
  • Mohammad Alali, ECE, “AI-Driven Data Collection for Effective Monitoring of Dynamical Systems”
  • Josh Pace, BioE, “Labeling and detection of circulating tumor cells in vivo with a fluorescent molecular contrast agent”
  • Quentin Meslier, BioE, “3D approaches to investigate bone adaptation”

Related Departments:Bioengineering, Chemical Engineering, Civil & Environmental Engineering, Electrical & Computer Engineering, Mechanical & Industrial Engineering