Doctoral students awarded Hluchyj Fellowships

Doctoral students Akshaya Shanmugam and Jalil Johnson have been awarded the 2012-13 Hluchyj Fellowship, which annually supports two graduate students in in the College of Engineering and the School of Nursing. The fellowship provides students with stipends so they can conduct interdisciplinary research in the area of clinical healthcare.

 

Michael Hluchyj, a 1979 graduate of the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department, and his wife Theresa, a 1977 alumna of the School of Nursing, created the graduate fellowship in 2008.

 

Since its creation, 10 scholars have been assisted by this collaboration. The Hluchyjs designed the fellowship to combine their backgrounds and personal priorities in engineering and nursing. It stipulates that fellows will work on research projects from both disciplines while seeking solutions to real problems in the clinical setting using engineering-based approaches.

 

Shanmugam has been working in the Biomedical Electronics Laboratory of Christopher Salthouse, the Dev and Linda Gupta Assistant Professor in the ECE Department. She has been the primary graduate student responsible for developing protocols in Salthouse’s lab for cell culture, cell staining, fluorescence imaging of cells in conventional microscopy and packaging of integrated circuits for lensless imaging. Shanmugam came to UMass Amherst from Meenakshi Sundararajan Engineering College in Chennai, India.

 

Johnson is a doctoral student in the School of Nursing who obtained a master’s degree from the Graduate School of Nursing at the UMass Medical School after earning a bachelor’s degree in nursing at Middle Tennessee State University. At UMass Worcester, Johnson specialized as an adult primary care nurse practitioner. Among other certifications, Johnson is a registered nurse in both Massachusetts and Tennessee and a licensed practical nurse. Since June 2010, Johnson has been a full-time adult nurse practitioner in internal medicine at the High Street Health Center in Springfield. 

 

Photos: Akshaya Shanmugam (top) and Jalil Johnson