Twelve University of Rochester students will carry out research at German institutions this summer, and another will work for a German manufacturing conglomerate, after being offered DAAD RISE scholarships. Including this year’s cohort, more than 60 Rochester undergraduate students will have participated in the RISE program since 2015.
The highly competitive Research Internships in Science and Engineering (RISE) program was established in 2005 and is sponsored by the German Academic Exchange Service, Germany’s publicly funded but independent organization of higher education institutions, known by its German initials as DAAD.
Applicants for this program consistently represent one of the largest pools of Rochester students competing for major fellowships.
RISE scholars are matched with a host university or institute according to their area of interest and are mentored by German doctoral students for up to three months. DAAD RISE scholars are paid a monthly stipend, and receive a travel allowance and a trip to the RISE Scholars weekend symposium in Heidelburg in July. Knowledge of German is not required, since work is conducted in English.
(University of Rochester photos / J. Adam Fenster)
Melissa Chang ’20, a neuroscience and psychology double major from Palo Alto, California, will conduct sports neuroscience research at Paderborn University in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. Her project investigates the relationship between sports performance and cortical processes by using mobile neuroimaging techniques. Chang has previous research experience in clinical enrollments and bladder cancer research and was an exchange student in Germany during high school. She plans to attend medical school.
Jack Dalton ’20, a mechanical engineering major from Lafayette, Louisiana, will be working at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Neustrelitz, helping with the development of a positioning method based on multiple Global Navigation Satellite Systems and evaluating the developed algorithm. Dalton plans to go into the aerospace industry after graduating from Rochester.
Nivedita Iyer ’21, a biochemistry major from Monroe Township, New Jersey, will be working in the department of molecular immunology at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. Her project will be to delete two genes in primary mouse B cells involved in B cell and plasma cell development. She’s currently working in the Phizicky Lab at the Medical Center and plans to attend medical school in the future.
Bartek Jezierski ’21, a computer science major from Gliwice, Poland, will be at the University of Konstanz, implementing techniques for batch processing of distance and shortest path queries on large graphs using the MapReduce framework. He attended school at the United World College Dilijan in Armenia. Last summer, he worked at the Polytechnic of Porto School of Engineering, implementing grammar rules of a Portuguese sign language translator-animator. He plans to earn a master’s degree and work in the fields of artificial intelligence and natural language processing.
Renee Niles ’19, a chemistry major from Binghamton, New York, will be working at the University of Hanover on a chemistry project involving iron complexes with switchable properties for data storage. She participated in research on semiconducting polymers at Binghamton University in 2017 as a National Science Foundation REU scholar and conducted her senior research in the lab of chemistry assistant professor Ellen Matson. She plans to attend graduate school in chemistry.
Kimberly Llajaruna Peralta ’20, a mechanical engineering and studio arts dual major from Lima, Peru, will be working on the development and testing of a user-friendly toolkit to support decision making in foresight at Karlsruhe Institute for Technology. She attended United World College of Costa Rica in high school for two years, and last summer was part of the MixingLab in the mechanical engineering department under the guidance of assistant professor Doug Kelley. Peralta plans to attend graduate school and pursue a career in mechanical engineering or industrial design.
Patrick Phillips ’21, a computer science and engineering science dual major from Rochester, will be working at the University of Hamburg on underwater autonomous robots. This is his first research experience and first time studying abroad. His future plans include research on artificial intelligence in graduate school and eventually working for a tech company.
Stephen Savchik ’20, a data science major from Pittsburgh, will be working at the University of Potsdam on a project studying the discourse function of question tags in the German language using computational machine-learning approaches. This will be his first independent research project. He plans to attend graduate school for computational linguistics.
Aman Shrestha ’21, a computer science major from Lalitpur, Nepal, will be working at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, researching how wearable devices that track daily activities can affect privacy. It’s his first research experience. He is interested in either attending graduate school or working in the field of mobile development or wearable devices. He has served as director of the University’s annual hackathon, Dandyhacks.
Leonor Teles ’21, a biomedical engineering major from Lisbon, Portugal, will be at the University of Kaiserslautern, investigating the anti-inflammatory and antitumoral properties in callus cultures of certain plant species. She attended Mahindra United World College of India in high school and last summer was part of the Grassroots on Site Work (GROW) internship for GlobeMed. She’s a research intern at the Goldman Lab in the Medical Center and hopes to attend graduate school, exploring and developing areas of advancement in cell and tissue engineering.
Jisoo Woo ’20, a chemistry major from Woodstock, Maryland, will be at Ulm University, working on the development of Co(III)-based hydrogen evolution reaction catalysis, which can be introduced on the carbon nanomembranes via dynamic covalent bonds. Woo was a National Science Foundation REU fellow at the Nilsson Group, working on co-assembly of amyloid beta fragments under acidic conditions, and also has been a member of the Paradine Research Group. He plans to pursue a PhD in chemistry and a career in academic research.
Bryce Elizabeth Yahn ’20, a brain and cognitive sciences major from Fairview, Pennsylvania, will work at Humboldt-University of Berlin, using psychophysical methods and EEG to study the interactions of cognitive attention and eye movements. She spent last summer as part of a research program at MIT, analyzing data from neurons in a monkey’s brain as the monkey performed an attention-based task. She also worked at Rochester in the cognitive physiology lab. She plans to earn a master’s degree in computational modeling and work in industry.
Sifan Ye ’20, a computer science major from Shanghai, China, is in the DAAD RISE Professional program and will be working in Munich on a communication interface for the Robot Operating System for Siemens AG, the largest industrial manufacturing company in Europe. He was part of the DAAD RISE university program last summer, researching the privacy impact of self-tracking devices at Saarland University. He also was part of Rochester research groups headed by computer science professor Ted Pawlicki and Jannick Rolland, the Brian J. Thompson Professor of Optical Engineering. Ye plans to attend graduate school and then work in industry.
