The Beckman Institute is pleased to announce the 2007 Beckman Fellows. The Beckman Institute Fellows program provides an excellent opportunity for young scholars to initiate a post-Ph.D. career of independent research in a stimulating and supportive interdisciplinary environment.

The 2007 Fellows are appointed for up to three years and will be begin as early as June of this calendar year. They are selected based on evidence of professional promise, capacity for independent work, outstanding achievement, and interdisciplinary research interests that correspond to one or more of the Beckman Institute's research initiatives.

Beckman Institute Director Pierre Wiltzius said the Fellows add greatly to the quality of research work being done here: "The Fellows program brings talented, young scholars from around the world to the Beckman Institute. Their varied backgrounds and leading-edge research topics complement the global work that is being done at Beckman."

The Beckman Fellows for 2007 are:

Jongseung Yoon
Jongseung has been serving as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology, where he received his Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering. His research seeks to understand the physical properties and microstructure of soft and hybrid materials such as polymer/inorganic composites, and to control their structure and patterning for applications in advanced photonic, phononic, and electronic technologies. Jongseung's planned research at Beckman will focus on novel approaches to materials and processing methods toward development of high performance photovoltaic devices for solar energy cells.

Séverine Lepage
Séverine is completing her Ph.D. in Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Liège, Belgium. Her research in the areas of structural dynamics and computational eng ineering is concerned with the development of efficient computational methods for the analysis and design of micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS). At Beckman, she plans to use the stochastic finite element method to advance MEMS development by improving design and reliability through the elaboration of a probabilistic CAD tool.

Zhi Jiang
Zhi earned a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Purdue University, where he currently works as a post-doctoral research associate in the area of spectral pulse shaping of ultrafast optical pulses. While at Purdue Zhi built the first grating-based spectral line-by-line pulse shaper. At Beckman he plans to apply optical pulse shaping techniques and coherent control to improve biomedical imaging applications such as optical coherence tomography (OCT).

Derek Hoiem
Derek is completing his Ph.D. in Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His research focuses on computer vision with an emphasis on learning appearance models and image-based scene understanding. As a Fellow at the Beckman Institute, he plans to work on developing computer vision algorithms that allow computers to truly understand the scene before them. His plan is to formulate the vision problem in terms of the underlying 3D scene and apply real-world knowledge to gain a spatial understanding of the scene layout and its contents. He will investigate the extent, source, and use of spatial understanding in humans while developing computer algorithms to replicate these abilities.