Current Postdoctoral Fellows: 2008 2007 2006 2005
Jacob Eisenstein
Jacob is currently a post-doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he is expected to earn his Ph.D. in Computer Science in June of 2008. His research focuses on non-verbal modalities such as gestures that supplement speech. At the Beckman Institute he plans to build computational statistical models of the relationship between gesture, speech, and discourse with the goal of improving natural language understanding.
Agustín Mihi
Agustín will join the Beckman Institute from the Spanish National Research Council where in July of 2008 he will complete his Ph.D. work at its Institute of Materials Science of Seville. His research explores new optical architectures to enhance light harvesting efficiency in solar cells. At the Beckman Institute, Agustín will work towards his goal of developing new generation solar cells that are more efficient, less expensive, and easier to implement than current options.
Amy Shih
This spring Amy will complete her Ph.D. in Biophysics and Computational Biology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests are focused on biophysical characterizations of the structure and function of health-relevant biomolecules. During her time as a Beckman Institute Fellow she plans to use advanced computational modeling to study proteins of biomedical and pharmaceutical interest.
Joel Voss
Joel received his Ph.D. in Psychology from Northwestern University in June of 2007. He will join the Beckman Institute after spending the past year as a post-doctoral researcher at Northwestern University. His research examines the operation of explicit and implicit expressions of memory. At the Beckman Institute he plans to use resources including the Biomedical Imaging Center to tackle key theoretical controversies in the cognitive neuroscience of human memory.
Jongseung Yoon
Jongseung has been serving as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology, where he received his Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering. His research seeks to understand the physical properties and microstructure of soft and hybrid materials such as polymer/inorganic composites, and to control their structure and patterning for applications in advanced photonic, phononic, and electronic technologies. Jongseung’s planned research at Beckman will focus on novel approaches to materials and processing methods toward development of high performance photovoltaic devices for solar energy cells.
Séverine Lepage
Séverine is completing her Ph.D. in Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Liège, Belgium. Her research in the areas of structural dynamics and computational engineering is concerned with the development of efficient computational methods for the analysis and design of micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS). At Beckman, she plans to use the stochastic finite element method to advance MEMS development by improving design and reliability through the elaboration of a probabilistic CAD tool.
Zhi Jiang
Zhi earned a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Purdue University, where he currently works as a post-doctoral research associate in the area of spectral pulse shaping of ultrafast optical pulses. While at Purdue Zhi built the first grating-based spectral line-by-line pulse shaper. At Beckman he plans to apply optical pulse shaping techniques and coherent control to improve biomedical imaging applications such as optical coherence tomography (OCT).
Derek Hoiem
Derek is completing his Ph.D. in Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His research focuses on computer vision with an emphasis on learning appearance models and image-based scene understanding. As a Fellow at the Beckman Institute, he plans to work on developing computer vision algorithms that allow computers to truly understand the scene before them. His plan is to formulate the vision problem in terms of the underlying 3D scene and apply real-world knowledge to gain a spatial understanding of the scene layout and its contents. He will investigate the extent, source, and use of spatial understanding in humans while developing computer algorithms to replicate these abilities.
2006 Fellows (PDF)
Joe Geddes
Joe joins Beckman from Penn State where he is getting his doctorate in Engineering Science. His thesis work has focused on the time-domain optical response of inhomogenous, anisotropic, and nonlinear materials like chiral sculptured thin films to excitation by ultrashort optical pulses. At Beckman he hopes to extend that work into new areas, particularly the design of novel photonic materials.
Yael Gertner
Yael was a Postdoc Fellow in the Psychology Department at the University of Illinois. Her research interests deal with how children acquire words and rules of their native languages and how these processes can be modeled using computational tools. Gertner plans to pursue further research in this area using experimental psycholinguistics and techniques from computational learning theory. She plans to use the knowledge derived from the experiments to design better learning algorithms that use the same features children use and obtain the same feedback that children obtain.
Ming Hsu
Ming Hsu comes to the Beckman Institute from the California Institute of Technology where he received his Ph.D. in Social Sciences in June of 2006. His thesis work focused on decision theory, microeconomic theory, behavioral economics, and neuroeconomics. At the Beckman Institute Ming plans to continue his work in neuroeconomics. His research uses brain imaging to examine which brain processes are engaged in the Ellsberg Paradox and the role of home bias phenomenon in investment decisions.
Mark Neider
Mark comes to Beckman from the SUNY Stony Brook Department of Psychology. His thesis work is examining the effects of target-background similarity on visual search. Neider's research goals are to reconcile the basic search literature with behavior observed under life-like conditions, while concurrently providing environmentally valid data from which to inform current models of visual attention and visual search.
Stephanie Rinne
Stephanie received her Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois. Her research interests include optical coherence tomography (OCT), which affords cellular resolution and in vivo imaging capability. Stephanie is looking to explore contrast in this imaging modality and ultimately improve the current contrast mechanisms to help provide earlier diagnosis techniques for cancer.
Dirk Walther
Dirk earned his Ph.D. in Computational and Neural Systems at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California. His research topic is "Modeling interactions of visual attention and object recognition in human and machine vision." As a Beckman Fellow, he plans to investigate the effects of task on human visual processing and their applications.
Sarah Brown-Schmidt
Sarah earned her Ph.D. from the University of Rochester in Brain and Cognitive Sciences. Her research focuses on the mechanisms by which people produce and understand utterances during the most basic form of language use: interactive conversation. She also has strong interests in language production, in particular how messages are planned during conversation.
2005 Fellows
Chandramallika Basak
Chandramallika Basak earned a Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology at Syracuse University. Her dissertation research was “Capacity limits of focus of attention and dynamics of focus switching in the N-Count task of working memory.” Her research included work on the perception of accelerated motion, age deficits in counting, and time-series modeling on continuous recognition memory. Chandramallika is part of the Biological Intelligence research theme, where her research is concentrated on two aspects of cognition: focus-switching and using cognitive training to lessen the effects of aging.
Silvio Savarese
Silvio Savarese earned his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology, completing his dissertation on “Perception and 3-D reconstruction of specular surfaces.” His research interests include: computer vision; shape representation, modeling and estimation; image-based modeling and rendering; three-dimensional scene modeling; human-machine interfaces; image processing, early vision processes; machine learning; human visual perception; and visual psychophysics. Silvio pursues these interests as a member of the Human-Computer Intelligent Interaction (HCII) research theme.
Zhihong Zeng
Zhihong Zeng earned his Ph.D. from the Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, with his dissertation “Real-time Shape Tracking under Various Circumstances.” He has been working with the Image Formation and Processing group at the Beckman Institute since 2002. Zhihong’s research interests in multimodal emotion assessment for human-computer interaction includes the psychological analysis of human emotion perception, computer vision, speech processing, and machine learning. Zhihong does research in the HCII research theme, focusing on multimodal emotional state assessment for human-computer interactions in naturally occurring settings.