Graduate students aim to use GRFP to further research and make impact in world
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Three UIC Richard and Loan Hill Department of Biomedical Engineering graduate students have been selected for the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program.
Recent UIC graduate Tessa Stewart along with PhD students Jacob McCoy and Leanna Pfeffer were chosen to participate in the GRFP program, which recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students who are pursuing full-time research-based master’s and doctoral degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields.
The five-year fellowship includes three years of financial support.
Jacob McCoy
“I’m looking forward to the support it will give me to complete my PhD and pursue a career where I develop medical technology to benefit the world,” McCoy said.
McCoy is pursuing a PhD with UIC BME and Electrical and Computer Engineering Associate Professor Benjamin Sanchez Terrones.
One of McCoy’s goals is to use electrical and computer engineering to solve medical problems.
After surviving a double lung-collapse two years ago, McCoy decided he wanted to pursue a career helping others live longer and happier lives.
With the GRFP, McCoy plans to keep pursuing his research in automating the recovery process for individuals who suffer from lingual neuropathy, which is damage to the nerves that control sensation or movement of the tongue, leading to numbness, tingling, or chronic burning pain.
Patients who receive radiation therapy to treat their oral cancer often have nerve damage after receiving the therapy and require speech therapy to help them recover.
“However, it is challenging to objectively measure and track their recovery process,” he said.
McCoy and his lab mates developed a mobile app that records patients as they practice reading sentences on their phones. The app uploads the recordings to a cloud server, where they are processed using signal processing algorithms and machine learning.
The results and speech recordings are automatically made available to their physician, which eliminates subjectivity in speech analysis and the need for frequent clinic visits.
McCoy added that this project is currently in its clinical testing phase.
His other research project focuses on creating an ultra-low power wearable electrocardiogram (ECG), a foundational medical tool used to monitor a plethora of diseases. Oftentimes, ECG requires constant monitoring because certain symptoms that can be detected with ECG only appear periodically. But this constant monitoring is a challenge because the device must often be taken off to charge. McCoy’s goal is to create an ECG that can run for decades without ever being charged.
Leanna Pfeffer
Pfeffer works in BME Associate Professor Tolou Shokuhfar’s lab, conducting research at the intersection of nanomedicine, biomaterials, and biological systems.
“I wanted to pursue research that connects engineering with meaningful biomedical problems,” Pfeffer said.
Pfeffer’s research focusing on developing a blood-brain barrier model and to better understand how engineered microenvironments influence cell behavior. The blood-brain barrier is protective, complex, and difficult to replicate outside the body.
But Pfeffer aims to create a platform that is reproducible, practical, and useful for researchers studying neurological disease and drug delivery.
For her, the GRFP was an opportunity to develop independent research ideas and work toward broader impacts in STEM.
“The GRFP also gives me the flexibility to take ownership of a complex project,” Pfeffer said. “Developing a blood-brain barrier model requires iteration, optimization, and careful validation. Support from the GRFP allows me to continue refining the platform and asking higher-impact questions about how engineered microenvironments affect neural and vascular cell behavior.”
Through her work, she strives to contribute to more predictive in vitro tools to reduce barriers in brain research and therapeutic testing. She plans to improve the physical system, biological environment, and overall operation of the blood-brain barrier model. She is also interested in incorporating approaches that allow real-time or more detailed analysis of the model as it matures.
“This project is not just about building a model,” she said. “It is about creating a tool that can help researchers ask better questions about the brain, the blood-brain barrier, and neurological disease.”