PhD Travel Award Winners
The Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (MIE) Conference Travel Award is a competitive stipend that supports MIE students who have demonstrated outstanding research contributions to their lab and the department. Recipients are selected for successfully sharing their impactful work through an oral presentation or poster at a major academic conference.
PhD students are invited to apply for up to $500 in travel funding from the PhD Network to support attendance at conferences, workshops, or professional development events. Each student may request funding once per academic year.
| Name | Conference | Student Info |
|---|---|---|
 Noah Chicoine |
I am a 6th-year PhD student in the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, working with Professor Jackie Griffin. My concentration is Industrial Engineering. My research focuses on pharmaceutical supply chain resiliency. At the INFORMS Annual Conference 2025 in Atlanta, GA, I will present a poster titled “An MDP Model of Inventory Management Policies for Managing Drug Shortages in Hospital Pharmacies Under Uncertain Lead Time Information”. | |
 Sepher Ilami |
IC2S2 2024 | I am a 3rd-year PhD student in the MAGICs Lab at the department of Industrial Engineering, working with Prof. Babak Heydari. My concentration is Network Science and Multi-agent Systems. My research focuses on Collective behavior and decision making. At the IC2S2 2024 in Philadelphia, PA, I presented a poster titled “Integrating Language Models with Agent-Based Modeling for Policy Analysis: The Case of EV Adoption”. |
 Haozhou Zhou |
71st Annual Reliability and Maintainability Symposium (RAMS 2025). | I am a 3rd-year PhD student in the MIE, working with Dr. Sagar Kamarthi and Dr. Srinivasan Radhakrishnan. My concentration is industrial engineering. My research focuses on building explainable and resource-aware predictive maintenance solutions for manufacturing equipment. At the 71st Annual Reliability and Maintainability Symposium (RAMS), Destin, Florida, I will present a podium talk titled ‘Feature Engineering Toolkit for Predictive Analytics in Engineering and Healthcare Informatics’. |
 Brett Emery |
I am a third-year PhD student in the Transformative Robotics Lab within the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department, working with Assistant Professor Jeff Lipton. My concentration is mechatronics. My research focuses on manipulating the physics of desktop scale 3D printing for the production of programable foam materials. At the SFF 2025 in Austin, Texas, I presented a podium talk titled Producing Stochastic Metal Foam on Desktop FFF 3D Printers using Viscous Thread Printing. | |
 Farnaz Feyli |
2025 ASME SB3C Summer Bioengineering Conference (SBC2025) | I am a second-year PhD student in the Mechanical Engineering Department, working with Professor Francis Loth. My concentration is in Thermofluids, and my research focuses on imaging-based morphometric analysis of Chiari Malformation. At SBC 2025 in Albuquerque, NM, I will present a poster titled ‘Morphometric Analysis of Pediatric Chiari Malformation: Age-Related Changes and Comparative Study with Adult Populations.’ |
 Jacob Miske |
IEEE RAS Robosoft 2025 | I am a 3rd year PhD student in the Transformative Robotics Lab, working with Prof. Jeff Lipton. My concentration is in Mechatronics and my research focuses on tools that enable reconfigurable manufacturing. At the IEEE Robosoft 2025 conference in Lausanne, Switzerland, I presented a talk on my lab’s work titled “Viscous Thread Printing (VTP) for Production of Soft Robotic Fingers”. |