2026 Student Fellows and Award Winners

This spring, multiple BME students received fellowships and awards for the 2026-27 academic year.

National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program
This prestigious, competitive fellowship supports outstanding graduate research across the country. It was established to recruit and support individuals who demonstrate the potential to make significant contributions in STEM, including STEM education.

Out of the 23 UW–Madison graduate students who earned the fellowship, two are from BME:

• Joshua Alexander
• Peyton Lancaster

Undergraduate Fellowships and Awards

The Hilldale Undergraduate and Sophomore Research Fellowships both provide a stipend to students and their faculty advisers to support their collaborative research.

Hilldale Undergraduate/Faculty Research Fellowship

Sudhindra Chavadam; Faculty Advisor: Colleen Witzenburg
Project: Biaxial Viscoelastic Characterization of Human and Porcine Aortic Valve Leaflets to Validate Porcine Surrogate Tissue Models

Amber DuVal; Faculty Advisor: Colleen Witzenburg
Project: Active Biomechanics and Histological Investigation of Venule and Arterial Tissue

Ellinore Letts; Faculty Advisor: María Virumbrales-Muñoz
Project: Magnetic Spheroids for Probing Lymphatic Endometrial Cancer Interactions and Effective Distance of Interaction

Conor Neill; Faculty Advisor: Alexey Glukhov
Project: Ultrastructural Compartmentalization of Mechano-Electrochemical Crosstalk between Caveolae, Sarcoplasmic Reticulum, and Mitochondria in Healthy and Diseased Hearts

Pranav Venkit; Faculty Advisor: Raunak Sinha
Project: Neural Architecture and Connectivity across Primates within the Retina’s First Synapse
This Hilldale Fellowship is sponsored by the McPherson Eye Research Institute

Sophomore Research Fellowship

Lauren Anderson; Faculty Advisor: Melissa Skala
Project: Correlating the Metabolism and ECM Structure of Cardiac Fibroblasts through Optical Metabolic Imaging and Second-Harmonic Generation Microscopy

Caroline Blust; Faculty Advisor: Josh Roth
Project: Development and Evaluation of a Fully Automated Preoperative Planning and Intraoperative Guidance Workflow for Periacetabular Osteotomy

Christopher DeCorte; Faculty Advisor: Matthew Brown
Project: Engineering Immune-Evasive Endothelium and Defining the Rejectome: Modeling and Predicting Early Allogeneic Graft Rejection