meet the eboard – Graduate Women in Science and Engineering @ SBU

Meet Zainab!

NAME: Zainab Aamir
EDUCATION (What and where): Ph.D. in Computer Science – Stony Brook University, Undergraduate in Computer Science from Lahore University of Management Sciences(LUMS)
RESEARCH INTERESTS: Software and system security, programming languages
CURRENT RESEARCH: (What do you study and what are the implications of that work?): Working on regular expressions in programming languages and how they can be exploited, how to resolve the Regular Expression Denial of Service Attack
FUTURE GOALS: To play my part in fixing some security vulnerabilities, especially for developers, and creating more secure programs and software.

Meet Roshni!

NAME: Roshni Patil
EDUCATION: B.S. Physics ‘18, UCLA; Will be graduating with Masters degree in Physics from SBU in December 2020 and start the masters program in Electrical Engineering in Spring 2021.

Meet Amani!

NAME: Amani Ebrahim
EDUCATION: Chemical and Molecular Engineering, Department of Chemical and Molecular Engineering
RESEARCH INTERESTS: Materials Science, Energy Conversion and Storage, Toxic Chemical Decontamination
CURRENT RESEARCH: I study the processes involved in the filtration and decomposition of chemical warfare agents on uniquely engineered nanoporous materials at the atomistic scale. These new materials could be the state-of-the-art technologies to rid the world from the hazards of chemical warfare agents.
FUTURE GOALS: I have many future goals, but they all encompass my love of science and that fact that I want to enrich students and encourage them to pursue studies in the STEM fields.

Meet Shreyoshi!

NAME: Shreyoshi Chakraborti
EDUCATION: I have graduated with a Bachelors and Masters in Chemistry and Biochemistry with a minor in Mathematics and Physics from University of Calcutta, India, In 2018. The same year I came to Stony Brook in a PhD program in Biochemistry and Structural Biology. Currently I am a third year PhD student in Prof Nicole S Sampson’s lab in Department of Chemistry.
RESEARCH INTERESTS: Finding out novel drug targets
CURRENT RESEARCH: I am working as a PhD student in Dr. Nicole S Sampson’s lab. My project comprises of the Biochemical aspects of cholesterol catabolism by Tb bacteria and finding out novel targets to inhibit virulence and infection of Mtb.
FUTURE GOALS: I want to be an author and scientist. I want to take up writing as a major part of my career.

Meet Cynthia!

NAME: Cynthia Converso
EDUCATION: I received a B.S. in Biochemistry with a minor in Mathematics from SUNY Geneseo in 2016. I started at Stony Brook as a Masters student in Biochemistry and Cell Biology and promptly switched to the Molecular and Cellular Biology PhD program in 2018. I have since chosen the Biochemistry and Cell Biology track.
RESEARCH INTERESTS: I am interested in understanding how DNA sequence plays a role in relaying which genes should be actively read or silenced.
CURRENT RESEARCH: I work with Budding yeast cells in order to decipher the role of DNA sequence in the site-specific deposition of a histone variant, H2A.Z, by the enzyme SWR. This plays an important role in telling the cell when and where to start transcribing genes. Miscommunication in this pathway can lead to multiple disorders, including cancer.
FUTURE GOALS: I plan to branch out in my research to include new organisms to study. After graduation, I plan to join a Postdoctoral program and eventually, become a professor!

Meet Taylor!

NAME: Taylor Medwig-Kinney
EDUCATION: I received my B.S. in Biology (Developmental Genetics) and Health Science (Public Health and Community Health Education) from Stony Brook University in 2016. I am currently pursuing my Ph.D. in Genetics at Stony Brook University as well.
RESEARCH INTERESTS: I am interested in the process of cell differentiation, or as I like to describe it, how cells decide what they are going to be when they “grow up.” I am particularly interested in how regulation of gene expression can give rise to many diverse cell types, despite these cells having identical genetic material.
CURRENT RESEARCH: I study how cells become invasive during development of the nematode C. elegans in the Matus Laboratory. This work can provide insights into how cancer cells metastasize and spread to other parts of the body.
FUTURE GOALS: My ultimate goal is to pursue a career in academia as a professor with my own research group, where I can teach and mentor future generations of scientists.

Meet Greeshma!

Greeshma Balabhadra

NAME: Greeshma Balabhadra
EDUCATION: PhD Second year, Applied Mathematics and Statistics. Bachelors in Technology, Mathematics and Computing, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati.
RESEARCH INTERESTS: Quantitative Finance, Deep learning
CURRENT RESEARCH: My current work focuses on High frequency Trading data identifying volatility patterns and their predictive performance using deep learning methods. My work also includes exploring different approaches of Information Geometry to learn the geometrical structure of families of probability distributions and its applications in Geometric deep learning.
FUTURE GOALS: I want to pursue my research interests on Sustainable Finance which focuses on financial services integration and investment in environmental, social and governance (ESG) into the business or investment decisions for the lasting benefit of both clients and society at large.

Meet Alexia!

NAME: Alexia Smith
EDUCATION: B.S. in Chemistry at University of Oregon
RESEARCH INTERESTS: Inorganic medicinal chemistry
CURRENT RESEARCH: I currently study the chemistry behind molecular imaging with lanthanides and radiometals, with the application toward novel cancer imaging and treatment strategies.
FUTURE GOALS: I hope to work in academia one day; I love to teach and mentor, but I also love exploring a problem inside and out, which has drawn me toward chemistry research.

Meet Payal!

NAME: Payal Mehta
EDUCATION: Current: Masters in Computer Science at Stony Brook University; Prior: Bachelors in Computer Engineering at KJ Somaiya College Of Engineering, India
CURRENT RESEARCH: I study computer science. I am working as a software engineer intern at Amazon this summer. I am building a tool that will allow other developers of my team to have a near real time view of the application, without which there is a limited if any visibility into what actually happens inside the application.
FUTURE GOALS: I want to open up my own company someday. I know this might sound crazy as I am 25 and nowhere close to even doing it but I like managing people and I think am pretty good at it, I am basically a people person and even though I am in a field where people don’t do much talking (except with their code) and are not that into “soft” skills, I have always been the one to bring this aspect into the team and I like carving a path and driving it.

Meet Jiayang!

NAME: Jiayang Yan
EDUCATION: B.S., University of Science of Technology of China (USTC); MA & PhD (ongoing) in Physics, Stony Brook University
RESEARCH INTERESTS: Accelerator Physics (Plasma Wakefield Acceleration)
CURRENT RESEARCH: In 2012, physicists were exciting when the Higgs boson particle was discovered at CERN on Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest and highest-energy particle collider lying in a 27-kilometer tunnel in circumference. Future high energy research requests a much more powerful machine than LHC, however the construction of which is constrained by its giant size (hundreds of kilometers in circumference). I’m working on beam driven plasma wakefield acceleration (PWFA), a novel technique to accelerate charged particles to extremely high energy (GeV) level within meter-scale, which promises to make future colliders more compact and affordable. My project focuses on getting a collider-quality accelerated electron beam using a method called beam-induced ionization injection (BIII), in which the accelerated beam is ionized by the space charge field of the drive beam then trapped and accelerated at the back of the plasma bubble.
FUTURE GOALS:I want to keep working on research at labs.