Award Roundup: Two School of IC Ph.D. Students in Spotlight

Sherilyn Francis has been named a research fellow in the National Institute of Health’s Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning Consortium to Advance Health Equity and Researcher Diversity (AIM-AHEAD). The fellowship comes with a $50,000 award, which Francis will receive over the next year.

Francis is a Ph.D. Student in Human-Centered Computing who works in the Wellness Technology Lab directed by Associate Professor Andrea Parker.

The NIH AIM-AHEAD program seeks to establish partnerships to increase the visibility of researchers from underrepresented communities in developing AI/ML models for electronic health record data.

Francis develops strategies to eliminate health disparities in racial and ethnic minority populations through technological and community-based participatory research. She also explores technical approaches to improving sexual and reproductive health outcomes among Black and African American women.

CORE Robotics Postdoctoral Fellow Named Rising Star

Sanne van Waveren has been accepted into Rising Stars, an academic career workshop in electrical engineering and computer science (EECS). Waveren is a postdoctoral fellow in the CORE Robotics Lab at Georgia Tech, led by Assistant Professor Matthew Gombolay.

Georgia Tech will host the EECS Rising Stars workshop, Nov. 8-10. Rising Stars is an intensive workshop recognizing outstanding talent among cisgender female, transgender, and nonbinary graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. The workshop prepares participants for academic careers in EECS.

MIT launched the first Rising Stars event in 2012. It has since been hosted annually at other institutions such as Carnegie Mellon University, Stanford University, University of California at Berkley, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.