Ana Daugherty
Daugherty received her Ph.D. in behavioral and cognitive neuroscience from Wayne State University in 2014. She has spent the last year working as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute of Gerontology at Wayne State. She is interested in cellular non-heme iron accumulation as a cause of progressive neural and cognitive decline that typifies aging, and its interaction with cardiovascular risk factors that are known to exacerbate decline. To examine these factors, she uses multi-modal neuroimaging, cognitive assessment, and advanced statistics to characterize differential brain aging, with a particular interest in the hippocampal formation and its diverse subfields. Daugherty plans to examine the potential protective effects of physical activity against metabolic vascular risk to potentially abate or even reverse the ill effects on cognitive function. At the Beckman Institute, she plans to work with Neal Cohen in the Cognitive Neuroscience Group, Art Kramer and Edward McAuley of the Human Perception and Performance Group, and Brad Sutton of the Bioimaging Science and Technology Group.

Daniel Kleinman
Kleinman received his Ph.D. in 2013 in psychology and cognitive science from the University of California, San Diego. He has been working as a postdoctoral researcher in the UC San Diego Department of Psychology. His research has addressed three questions: first, how does attention affect language production in bilinguals and monolinguals? Second, how are bilinguals so successful at speaking in their intended language? Third, what kinds of expectations do comprehenders form during language comprehension and how do these expectations interface with the production system?

At the Beckman Institute, Kleinman plans to investigate how the attentional requirements of language processing may allow bilinguals and monolinguals to produce and comprehend hard-to-access words more easily in connected speech than in isolation. He plans to work with Gary Dell, Darren Tanner, and Jennifer Cole from the Cognitive Science Group, as well as Kara Federmeier and Gabriele Gratton from the Cognitive Neuroscience Group.

Fan Lam
Lam will receive his Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering in May 2015 from the University of Illinois. His research focuses on developing models, algorithms, and theoretical analysis for sparse sampling, de-noising and parameter estimation in applications to magnetic resonance (MR)-based neuroimaging. He plans to develop and apply MR spectroscopic imaging, functional imaging and quantitative diffusion imaging techniques to study brain function. At the Beckman Institute, he plans to work with Brad Sutton and Zhi-Pei Liang, from the Bioimaging Science and Technology Group; and Gene Robinson, of the NeuroTech Group.

Maxwell Robb
Robb is interested in developing functional materials that respond to mechanical force to enable autonomic self-signaling and self-healing functionality. Robb received his Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2014, and has been working as a postdoctoral research associate with Jeffrey Moore, professor of chemistry and a member of Beckman’s Autonomous Materials Systems (AMS) Group. Robb plans to continue to work with Moore, as well as Nancy Sottos and Scott White of the AMS Group.

Limei Tian
Tian’s research focuses on the design, synthesis and hierarchical assembly of inorganic materials, and their integration with organic materials for various optoelectronic applications. Specifically, she envisions a multimodal sensing system by integrating wireless passive antennas with a powerful optical sensing platform, namely, surface-enhanced Raman scattering. Tian received her Ph.D. from the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at Washington University in 2014. She plans to work with John Rogers and Paul Braun from the 3D Micro- and Nanosystems Group, as well as Rohit Bhargava from the Bioimaging Science and Technology Group.
 
Yingjie Zhang
Zhang will receive a Ph.D. degree in applied science and technology from UC Berkeley in May 2015. His Ph.D. research focused on solution-processed electronic materials, where nanoscale building blocks are assembled into functional materials for energy applications. He used various scanning probe-based imaging and spectroscopy techniques to study the electronic structure of individual building blocks (organic molecules or semiconductor quantum dots), and map out the energetic and spatial pathways of charge transport. He also explored novel colloidal quantum dot-based optoelectronic devices based on the percolation transport mechanism with untraditional design of defects. Zhang plans to work with Martin Gruebele, Xiuling Li, and Joseph Lyding of the Nanoelectronics and Nanomaterials Group at Beckman, where his research will be extended to the angstrom scale. He plans to perform atomic-scale imaging of two dimensional electronic materials, and seek novel quantum device applications such as quantum memory, computing, transistor and sensing, harnessing the charge, spin, and valley degrees of freedom.