Advancing Computer Science Careers through Enhanced Networking and Training
ASCENT Affiliates
Yaron Levinson is a Postdoctorate in the Runway Program at the Jacobs Institute at Cornell Tech. He received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees (with honors) in Mechanical Engineering from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in 2007 and 2008, respectively, where he worked on continuous robots. He recently got his Ph.D. degree in Control, Signal Processing and Optimization from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. During his studies at Technion, Yaron worked as an intern at the Controls and Robotics group at General Motors Advanced Technical Center in Israel and as senior algorithm engineer at Medical Surgery Technologies, a small Israeli startup company developing a robotic system for laparoscopic surgeries. His research interests includes robotics, optimization, and ways in which we can exploit the data each of us generates in our everyday lives to enhance medical treatment.
Zhaoguo Wang is a Postdoctoral Researcher at New York University in the Networking and Wide-Area Systems Group. He received his Ph.D in Computer Science from Fudan University under the supervision of Prof. Binyu Zang, Prof. Haibo Chen, and Prof. Jinyang Li. His received his M.S. from Fudan University and his B.S. from Nanjing University in 2011 and 2008, respectively. His research interests are operating systems and system virtualization, multicore in-memory databases, and scalable full system emulation.
Harvey Chin is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the O'Shaughnessy Group at Columbia University. He received his B.A. in Molecular Biology from Princeton University in 2004 and his Ph.D. in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry from Yale University in 2010. His research specialties include kinetics, enzymology, and molecular motors. He is a member of both the New York Academy of Science and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Jennifer Haghpanah is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Columbia University in the Chemical Engineering department. She received her Ph.D. in Materials Chemistry at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University in 2012 and a dual B.S./B.A. degree in Chemistry and Mathematics from Quinnipiac University in 2006. Her research focuses on materials chemistry with a specialty in protein engineering and molecular biology.
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Manoop Talasila is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Computer Science department at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. He received his P.hD. under Professor Cristian Borcea (advisor) and Professor Reza Curtmola (co-advisor) in the Department of Computer Science at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. He received his M.S. in Computer Science from Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Manoop's areas of research interest are mobile and ubiquitous computing, mobile crowd sensing, secure location authentication of smart phones, and mobile games.
Laura Kraya is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Chemical and Biological Engineering department at Princeton University. She received both her Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania and her Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Delaware. Her research interests include atomic force microscopy, nanotechnology, and nanomaterials.
Hammad Sheikh is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the New School for Social Research and the Center on Terrorism (CUNY). He received a Psycholgie Diplom (equivalent to M.Sc.) from the Free University of Berlin in 2008 and a Ph.D. in Social Psychology from the New School for Social Research in 2014. Prior to his studies at the New School, he conducted research at the Max-Planck-Institute for Human Development in Berlin, the University College Dublin, and the Free University of Berlin. His research focuses on the psychology of intergroup conflict and intragroup cooperation, and utilizes a diversity of methods including focus groups, interviews, large-scale surveys, and cognitive experiments. He is currently examining the role that religious ritual and sacredness play in creating commitment to group interests, leading to prosocial behaviors, and in the context of intergroup conflict, to political violence
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John Basbagill is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University researching the sustainable built environment. Originally from Chicago, John received his B.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science from Harvard University, his M.S. in Building Science from the University of Southern California’s School of Architecture, and his Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental engineering from Stanford University. His research interests are in sustainable architecture, life cycle assessment, and multi-disciplinary design optimization. His research leverages automated methods that generate many building design alternatives for architects, developers, and others involved in the design process, in order to visually and quantitatively inform them of the life cycle environmental impact and cost implications of conceptual design decisions. He plans to develop an application that uses such methods to help designers create low-cost, low-carbon buildings at the earliest stages of the design process. His research has been published in Automation in Construction, Building and Environment, and the Journal of Industrial Ecology.
Rola Bekdash is an NRSA Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the laboratory of Neil Harrison in the Anesthesiology Department at Columbia University. She received her B.S. degree and M.S. degree in Biology from the American University of Beirut and her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Rutgers University and the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. Her research focuses on the effects of gene-environment interaction during early development on brain function and behavior. In particular, she is studying the epigenetic effects of substance abuse such as alcohol abuse during adolescence on inhibition in the thalamus. Her goal is to apply her research to help people overcome addiction and live a better life. Her research specialties include epigenetics, stress and drug addiction. She is a member of the Society for Neuroscience, the Research Society on Alcoholism, the New York Academy of Sciences, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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Stewart Bachan is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at Hunter College, CUNY. He received his B.S. in Chemistry and Management from the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad in 2001 and his Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from The Graduate Center and Hunter College, CUNY in 2012. His research specialities include synthetic organic chemistry, nuclear magnetic reasonance (NMR) spectroscopy, infrared (IR) spectroscopy, and various techniques in chromatography. In addition to research, Stewart has extensive experience in teaching undergraduate courses in both general and organic chemistry, as well as mentoring undergraduate research students. He is also a member of the New York Academy of Sciences.
Christof Drechsel-Grau is a theoretical chemist and Postdoctoral Researcher at New York University. He is interested in charge transfer in condensed phases and in the boundary between the classical and the quantum world. Having completed his initial training in Europe, he is currently working in NYU's Chemistry Department to learn new simulation methods and to contribute to the microscopic understanding of proton transfer and solvation close to fatty-acid bilayers. He received his M.Sc. from Ecole Normale Superieure in Molecular Physical Chemistry, and his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in Theoretical Chemistry.
Biran Wang is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the City College of New York, CUNY, in the Auguste Lab for Bioresponsive Drug Delivery and Tissue Engineering. He received a degree in Thermal and Energy Engineering from the Université Paris X Nanterre and a degree in Chemical Engineering from the Université de Technologie de Compiègne. He received his Ph.D. in Biophysics from the Université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis in 2012. He is also a member of the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES), the Society of Asian Scientists and Engineers (SASE), and the New York Academy of Sciences.
Daniel Reichman is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University. He is hosted by Joe Halpern and Rafael Pass. Daniel recently obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Weizmann Institute, where his advisor was Uri Feige. His research interests include theoretical computer science, specifically heuristics and average-case analysis, as well as probabilistic combinatorics and applied probability. He is also interested in interdisciplinary research, involving mathematics, human and artificial intelligence, and the social sciences.
Sandhya Prabhakaran is a Postdoctoral Research Scientist at Columbia University in the Dana Pe'er Lab of Computational Systems Biology. Her research focuses on developing and applying statistical models to problems in computational biology, machine vision, robotics and text processing. She works on clustering, network inference, and sparsity selection models. Sandhya received her B.S. in Computer Engineering from Cochin University of Science and Technology, her M.S. in Artificial Intelligence/Intelligent Robotics from the University of Edinburgh, and her Ph.D. in Applied Statistics and Machine Learning from the University of Basel, Switzerland.
Sandeep Mudigonda is a Postdoctoral Fellow at New York University in the Urban Mobility and ITS Systems Laboratory. His research focuses on traffic simulation, calibration and validation, connected vehicles, data analysis and visualization. Sandeep received his B.S. in Civil Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, and both his M.S. and Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from Rutgers University.
Leora Yetnikoff is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Columbia University Medical Center, where she is investigating the morphological basis for dopamine/glutamate co-transmission, its ontogeny, and modulation by exposure to drugs of abuse using proximity ligation assay and electrophysiological techniques. She received her B.S. in Psychology from Concordia University, her M.S. degree in Psychiatry and Neuroscience from McGill University, and her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from McGill University.
Minh Tuan Trinh is a Postdoctoral Research Scientist in the XYZ Lab for Light-Matter Interaction, Solar Energy Conversion, and Ultrafast Spectroscopy at Columbia University. His research focuses on charge transfer dynamics and femtosecond spectroscopy. Minh received his B.S. in Physics and Optics from Vietnam National University, Ha Noi, his M.S. in Nonlinear Optics from Chungbuk National University, and his Ph.D. in Opto-electronic Materials from Delft University of Technology.
Sina Kashuk is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the NOAA-CREST Institute (CCNY-CUNY). He also serves as a liaison between NOAA-CREST and NYU-CUSP to facilitate collaboration and exchange of ideas on a range of projects. His research interests include the application of remote sensing and data-intensive analysis and modeling, which he currently implements for flood mapping, flood impact visualization, and urban flood resiliency. In addition to his research initiatives, Dr. Kashuk has instructed various civil engineering laboratories for several years, including fluid and soil mechanics as well as environmental engineering. He received his Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from the NYU School of Engineering in 2014.
Laurent Charlin was a Postdoctoral Researcher at Columbia University in the Computer Science department under the supervision of David Blei. He graduated with a Ph.D. in the Machine Learning Group from the University of Toronto, where he was co-advised by Craig Boutilier and Rich Zemel. His research interests can be broadly defined as spanning the field of machine learning. More precisely, his current work is on using machine learning to extend the capabilities of recommender systems. He has also done work in reasoning/decision-making under uncertainty and is generally interested in applying learning methods to different problems, as well as learning theory. He received his M.S. degree from the University of Waterloo (Canada) in the AI Group at the School of Computer Science in December 2006. His work, under the supervision of Pascal Poupart, focused on discovering abstractions in planning problems modelled as partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs). Laurent is currently completing a postdoc at McGill University in Montreal.
