Genevieve Flaspohler selected for NSF Graduate Research Fellowship

Genevieve Flaspohler, a senior in Computer Engineering, has been awarded a prestigious NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.

During the past four years, Genevieve has been involved in many interesting interdisciplinary research projects at the University of Michigan. She has worked with Prof. Art Kuo in Mechanical Engineering to develop intelligent lower limb protheses, with Prof. Prabal Dutta to explore new communication paradigms for low-power embedded devices, and most recently, has collaborated with Dr. Alex Shorter in Mechanical Engineering to design custom embedded sensor tags and data processing algorithms that will enable biologists to study the behavior of invertebrate marine animals such as squid and jellyfish.

Next fall, Genevieve will continue her research in the MIT and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute joint program, pursuing a PhD in computer science with a focus in oceanography. Her research interests include problems in perception and exploration for autonomous marine robots and the development of learning algorithms for behavior classification in marine ecosystems.

Outside of research, Genevieve has been an active member of the Woven Wind student engineering team. After two years of collaboration with A2STEAM elementary school in Ann Arbor, the team installed a small-scale educational wind turbine at the school this spring. She has also been involved in the gEECS mentorship program at Michigan, was a peer mentor in the Michigan Research Community, and will spend this summer working for Dunkadoo, a non-profit organization in Ann Arbor that develops software for conservation organizations and citizen scientists to capture and analyze their field data.

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The National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) helps ensure the vitality of the human resource base of science and engineering in the United States and reinforces its diversity. The program recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines who are pursuing research-based master’s and doctoral degrees at accredited United States institutions.

Posted: April 4, 2016