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AIS 2025 Science Mentor

Anne McNeil

Our research aims to address some of the world’s biggest challenges through chemical recycling of waste plastics, developing methods to capture microplastics, measuring microplastics in the environment, and designing redox-active molecules for energy storage applications. Accomplishments and Awards

Brendon Watson

I am a neuroscientist and psychiatrist with the goal of understanding brain mechanisms related to both neuropsychiatric disease and to healthy brain function. My approach use advanced neuroscientific tools that give insight into neural circuit function in relation behavior. I trained under Drs. Rafael Yuste and Gyorgy Buzsaki and have expertise in cortical and hippocampal ...

Charles Brooks

Our work is focused on the applications of statistical mechanics to the modeling and simulation of processes in biology, ranging from small molecule discovery for therapeutics and tool molecules, novel free energy methods for drug and protein design, biocatalyst discovery and design, and protein and RNA folding. Data science and machine learning, more specifically, are ...

Vladimir Dvorkin

My work focuses on decision-making models and algorithms for enhancing planning, operation, and pricing in electric power systems with substantial renewable energy integration and rising AI-driven electricity demand. This involves developing prescriptive analytics—such as decision-focused and physics-informed machine learning models—to manage grid uncertainties, building large-scale equilibrium models to analyze interactions among AI users in the ...

Patricia Alves-Oliveira

I lead Robot Studio, a Research lab in the Robotics Department of the University of Michigan. Our work is focused on democratizing health and arts with social robots. We develop human-centered robot systems that enhance the quality of life and that promotes creativity. Our lab is interdisciplinary, composed of researchers from computer science, engineering, information ...

Saif Benjaafar

I used the tools of operations research (optimization, stochastic modeling, and game theory), machine learning, and statistics to study problems in operations management broadly defined, including supply chains, service systems, transportation and mobility, and markets. My current research focus is on sustainable operations and innovative business models, including sharing economy, on-demand services, and online marketplaces.

Vikram Gavini

The Computational Materials Physics group under the direction of Vikram Gavini focuses on developing computational frameworks and algorithms to enable large-scale ab-initio calculations for predictive materials simulations. The two main present thrusts of the group since 2020 are: (i) Developing fast and accurate large-scale density functional theory (DFT) calculations; (ii) Development of a computational framework ...

Omar Jamil Ahmed

The Ahmed lab studies behavioral neural circuits and attempts to repair them when they go awry in neurological disorders. Working with patients and with transgenic rodent models, we focus on how space, time and speed are encoded by the spatial navigation and memory circuits of the brain. We also focus on how these same circuits ...

Oleg Gnedin

I am a theoretical astrophysicist studying the origins and structure of galaxies in the universe. My research focuses on developing more realistic gasdynamics simulations, starting with the initial conditions that are well constrained by observations, and advancing them in time with high spatial resolution using adaptive mesh refinement. I use machine-learning techniques to compare simulation ...