Univ of Virginia Graduate Students Earn NSF Fellowships
Posted by John Hunter | Under NSF Fellows Friday Jul 20, 20075 U.Va. Graduate Students Earn Coveted NSF Fellowships:
Jennie Doberne, Anthropology, Advisor: Susan McKinnon
“My research focuses on older women’s quest for motherhood as a way to investigate the social and technological limits of pronatalism in Israel. By extending technological and medical resources, the national pronatalist effort is eroding previous biological constraints on maternity and enabling older women to become mothers. This project seeks to account for aging within the cultural complexities of the medical and social production of motherhood in Israel.”
Niccolo Fiorentino, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Advisor: Silvia Blemker
“I work with Dr. Silvia Blemker in the Multi-scale Muscle Mechanics Laboratory in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. My research project focuses on characterizing the way muscles change shape during motion, determining how muscles generate force to produce joint movement, and developing methods to model complex muscle behavior. I utilize non-invasive imaging techniques such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to study muscle contraction during dynamic joint movement and construct anatomically accurate musculoskeletal models. I am applying these techniques to understanding and improving the treatments for muscle impairments associated with movement disorders such as cerebral palsy.”
Erin Reed, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Advisor: Jim McDaniel
“My research involves using a non-intrusive measurement method called Planar Laser Induced Iodine Fluorescence which involves seeding iodine molecules into a flow and shining a laser sheet across it, causing it to fluoresce or shine allowing us to obtain visuals of the flow as well as velocity and mole fraction measurements. This method will be applied to a model in hypersonic flow to investigate flow characteristics in a mixed rarefied continuum regime for use in the simulation of a space vehicle entering Mars or Earth atmosphere.”
Read more, including on the two other UVA GRFP fellows: Hillary Schaefer and Adam Watson
“My research involves using a non-intrusive measurement method called Planar Laser Induced Iodine Fluorescence which involves seeding iodine molecules into a flow and shining a laser sheet across it, causing it to fluoresce or shine allowing us to obtain visuals of the flow as well as velocity and mole fraction measurements…”