Four ECE undergraduates earn competitive research fellowships

For four undergraduate researchers from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at UW–Madison, the opportunity to pursue hands-on research is taking an exciting step forward. All four have received undergraduate research fellowships. These competitive awards provide funding and research opportunities that allow students to explore their interests, work closely with faculty mentors and gain valuable experience as researchers. Undergraduate research is a distinctive strength of the ECE experience, and these four students are putting their ideas into action while advancing research through these fellowships.

Hilldale Research Fellowships

Ahmed Ibrahim
Major: Electrical Engineering
Project: Understanding and Controlling the Chemically Induced Phase Transformation (ChIPT) of 2D Graphene into Ultrathin 3D Diamond
Faculty Advisor: Assistant Professor Robert Jacobberger, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Ibrahim’s research aims to discover how to control the novel synthesis process that converts 2D graphene into diamane, an ultrathin analogue of 3D diamond. By learning how to guide and enhance this growth process, they aim to enable scalable manufacturing routes for creating custom, atomically precise materials. These unprecedented materials will power major next-generation advances across semiconductor electronics, quantum information science, and clean energy.

Ibrahim’s Hilldale Fellowship is sponsored by the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, with support from the J & H Wang Family Fund.

Jake Yun
Major: Computer Engineering, Computer Sciences
Project: MedImage-FLEX: Medical Image Foundation Latent Embedding eXamination
Faculty Advisor: Professor Alan McMillan, Department of Radiology

MedImage-FLEX is a model-agnostic benchmark for evaluating medical vision foundation models by testing how well their frozen embeddings support lightweight downstream adapters and embedding-space tasks, including classification, retrieval, and clustering across diverse medical imaging domains. Its potential impact is to make foundation model selection more transparent, reproducible, and compute-efficient while helping legitimize low-resource embedding-based adaptation as a serious path for medical imaging AI.

Sophomore Research Fellowships

Heng (Dariush) Lasiang
Major: Electrical Engineering, Physics
Project: Simulating Nanoscale Photon Transport and its Effects on Near-field Thermophotovoltaic Cell Performance
Faculty Advisor: Assistant Professor Eric Tervo, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Lasiang’s research focuses on modeling thermophotovoltaic cells (TPVs), which are devices that capture heat from hot objects and convert them into electricity. TPVs are critical for extracting heat from thermal batteries: a low cost, scalable alternative to lithium-ion batteries. Because TPVs operate in near-field regimes, a special framework of physics — fluctuational electrodynamics — has to be used to accurately model their performance, which is what Lasiang aims to add as a module to an open-source tool (Solcore) for simulating semiconductor devices. 

Carrie (Yuhan) Xing
Major: Electrical Engineering
Project: A Triboelectric Nanogenerator-Based Energy Harvesting Strategy for Prolonging the Battery Life of Sports Headphones
Faculty Advisor: Professor Xudong Wang, Department of Materials Science and Engineering

Xing’s project develops a compact triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG)-based energy harvesting system that converts mechanical energy from walking and running into electrical energy to supplement the battery of bone-conduction sports headphones. By integrating an optimized spring–mass TENG structure with an efficient rectification and energy storage circuit, the system aims to extend battery life and reduce charging frequency. Ultimately, this work could demonstrate a practical approach for integrating sustainable, motion-powered energy harvesting into compact wearable electronics.