Congratulations to Student Lai Xu
7/19/07
ECE's PhD student Lai Xu has received one of the seven 2007-08
fellowships awarded by UNM's Program in Interdisciplinary
Biological & Biomedical Science (PIBBS).
Lai Xu is studying for her PhD with ECE Prof. Vince Calhoun at his Medical Image
Analysis Laboratory, which is located at the MIND Institute on campus.
Lai's doctoral research involves structural MRI images with a focus on
developing approaches for identifying changes in brain structure,
including both gray matter and white matter, using source-based
morphometry. She is currently applying this work to schizophrenia.
Lai Xu's fellowship comes with a monthy stipend, health insurance, and
up to 12 credit hours of tuition and fees, totalling $22,382.
Lai says that she feels lucky to have joined Prof. Calhoun's
engineering group doing brain research. "The brain is magic, and
engineering is precise," she says. "What will happen when we combine
them?"
Inspired as a youth by Number 5—the robot in the 1986 comedy
Short Circuit—Lai dreamed of building robots while also learning
violin and enjoying her artistic skills. She now finds that playing
violin provides relief when she encounters difficult research
problems. The meaning of her full name, Xu Lai, seems a good fit:
"thinking carefully before doing."
Lai grew up in Xi'an, China—which was
the country's capitol for twelve dynasties—and she graduated from
Xi'an Jiaotong University.
PIBBS awards its fellowships to
UNM students in computer science, mathematics & statistics, physics &
astronomy, anthropology, and biology. It is founded on the belief that
research in biology and biomedical science benefits from the ideas,
methods, and investigative strategies of engineers, mathematicians and
physical scientists.
According to the PIBBS website, its goal is to give PhD students
training opportunities that will provide them with the skills and
knowledge needed to conduct leading-edge interdisciplinary research.
Students learn about the disparate ways in which the various
scientific disciplines tackle and solve scientific problems, and they
are exposed to the language, culture, technology, literature and
different perspectives and approaches used by various disciplines.
They also learn communication, scientific, and social skills necessary
to work effectively in small interdisciplinary research teams.
Just more than a year old, PIBBS is a collaboration of UNM's
departments of Biology, Computer Science, Physics & Astronomy, and
Math & Statistics as well as Los Alamos National Laboratory and the
Santa Fe Institute. It is funded by the Howard Hughes Medical
Institute and the National Institutes of Health.
Congratulations, Lai.
|
Check out our...
