How To Do Grad School

Yves Nazon II is a PhD student in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan and received the MS degree in Mechanical Engineering from Northwestern University. During his time as an undergraduate student at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC), he participated in the Meyerhoff Scholars and the MARC U*STAR trainee programs. He also worked in the Energy Harvesting & Design Optimization Lab and did summer research at Purdue University, MIT, and University of Southern California.

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Emily Roberts is an entrepreneur whose mission is to inspire and empower early-career PhDs to make the most of their money. She obtained a PhD in biomedical engineering from Duke in 2014 and now engages with graduate students and postdocs through her Personal Finance for PhDs seminars, coaching, and websites, Personal Finance for PhDs and PhD Stipends.

Learn more on the site: http://pfforphds.com/

Alejandro F. Azocar is an engineer and scientist experienced in cross-functional projects spanning mechanical, electrical, and software, with a background in the biomedical and aerospace industries. He is currently a Robotics and Biomechanics resident at (Google) X.

He holds a bachelor's degree in Aerospace Engineering from Texas A&M University, a master's degree in Biomedical Engineering from Northwestern University, and a doctoral degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Michigan, where he developed an open-source bionic leg.

Find out more about Alejandro on his website: https://www.afazocar.com

Lorelay Mendoza is a PhD student in Environmental Engineering at Stanford University and holds a B.S. in Environmental Engineering from San Diego State University. She is interested in resource recovery from waste, environmental justice, and the fate of contaminants in electrochemical treatment systems and the environment.

MARC U-STAR: Maximizing Access to Research Careers Undergraduate Student Training in Academic Research - https://www.nigms.nih.gov/training/marc/pages/FAQs.aspx

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Hang (Lucas) Dong is a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University. He was born and raised in China and holds a PhD from Lehigh University. His research focuses on the combination of electrochemistry and ion exchange for selective water treatment and nutrient recovery.

Allison Okamura is a Professor in the mechanical engineering department at Stanford University, with a courtesy appointment in computer science. She received the BS degree from the University of California at Berkeley, and the MS and PhD degrees from Stanford University. She is an IEEE Fellow and is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the journal IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters. Her awards include the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society Technical Achievement Award, IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Distinguished Service Award, and Duca Family University Fellow in Undergraduate Education. Her academic interests include haptics, teleoperation, virtual reality, medical robotics, soft robotics, rehabilitation, and education.

Learn more about Allison’s work on the CHARM Lab website: http://charm.stanford.edu/

Daniel Bruder is a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University. His research interests include robotics, dynamics, and controls with a specific focus on soft robots. Currently, he is exploring physics-based and data-driven modeling and control methods for soft robots in an effort to make such systems more capable and reliable.

He is originally from Farmington Hills, Michigan and received a B.S. in Engineering Sciences from Harvard University in 2013. After graduating, he worked as a math teacher at the Jalen Rose Leadership Academy in Detroit, then earned a PhD in mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan in 2020.

Dan’s website: www.danielbruder.com

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Jessica is a PhD student in the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at the University of Oxford, researching the cannabis industry. Her research explores how cannabis companies influence cannabis policies. More specifically, she looks at the business decisions, investment deals and commercial relations that informally shift the law, morality, perceptions, and stigmas.

She is an official delegate for cannabis related meetings held at the UN and WHO and is Managing Director of an international cannabis consultancy, The Global C.

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EMERGE: https://emerge.engin.umich.edu

Devin Guillory is currently a PhD student in computer science at UC Berkeley advised by Trevor Darrell. He holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. His research areas of focus are Computer Vision and Machine Learning. Devin’s active research interests include problems of learning with less labels and improving Out-of-Distribution model performance.

Prior to UC Berkeley, Devin worked as a Staff Data Scientist at Etsy where he served as Technical Lead on Search Ranking and Computational Advertising teams. As a founding engineer of Blackbird Technologies, Devin joined Etsy in 2016 by way of acquisition. Having worked on a variety of machine learning problems (Computer Vision, Robotics, Natural Language Processing, Information Retrieval, Computational Advertising) in real-world settings, Devin is passionate about areas where theory and practice diverge.

MAE Leaders Site: https://sites.google.com/view/maeleaders

Black in AI site: https://blackinai.github.io/

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Timnit Gebru is an AI researcher on the Ethical AI team at Google. Prior to working at Google, she did a postdoc at Microsoft Research in the FATE (Fairness Transparency Accountability and Ethics in AI) group after getting her PhD from Stanford University. Before her PhD, she also worked at Apple designing circuits and signal processing algorithms for various Apple products including the first iPad.

She is an advocate for diversity in technology and is the co-founder of Black in AI, a community of black researchers working in artificial intelligence.

There has been a lot of media coverage about Timnit’s work, so a Google search of her name is sufficient to learn a lot more. Here is an article to get you started: https://www.forbes.com/sites/nvidia/2018/07/10/ai-innovators-how-one-woman-followed-her-passion-and-brought-diversity-to-ai/#676ae3b5286d

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