Graduate student researchers receive highly-competitive awards from international societies

Four graduate students, all advised by Zhongming Liu, an assistant professor of biomedical and electrical and computer engineering, have received highly competitive awards for outstanding papers and posters presented at recent conferences. Jiayue Cao, Kun-Han Lu, Ranajay Mandal, and Junxing Shi are all graduate research assistants working in Liu’s Laboratory of Integrated Brain Imaging at Purdue University’s Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering.

Junxing Shi, a graduate student in electrical and computer engineering, won a $2K Merit Abstract Award at the annual meeting of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping (OHBM), an international society dedicated to brain imaging and neuroscience in humans. He presented his paper, "Deep recurrent neural network reveals a hierarchy of temporal receptive window in the visual cortex," in both oral and poster presentations.

Kun-Han Lu, a PhD student in electrical and computer engineering, won a summa cum laude award at the scientific meeting of the International Society of Magnetic Resonance for Medicine (ISMRM), for his abstract entitled, "Spontaneous brain activity in the visual cortex is organized by visual streams". This work was also recently published in Human Brain Mapping, a highly respected journal ranked #2 among neuroimaging journals. The summa cum laude award is given to trainee members whose abstracts score in the top 5 percent within a major subject review category. The conference took place June 16-21, 2017, in Honolulu, Hawai’i.

Lu also won a magna cum laude award at the ISMRM conference. Lu won for his abstract entitled "Manganese enhanced MRI for imaging inflammation in rats". The magna cum laude award is given to trainee members whose abstracts score in the top 15 percent within a major subject review category.

Ranajay Mandal and Jiayue Cao, both PhD students in the Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering also won magna cum laude awards at the ISMRM conference. Mandal won for the abstract, “Multimodal imaging: MR-compatible, gradient artifact free, wireless recording system integrated with MR-scanner for simultaneous EEG and fMRI acquisition". This work was also highlighted for power-pitch for highly-rated scientific merits. Cao won for the abstract entitled, “Map vagus nerve stimulation evoked CNS response using fMRI.”

Photo: Graduate research assistants (left to right) Jiayue Cao, Junxing Shi, Ranajay Mandal and Kun-Han Lu were honored for outstanding abstracts at summer conferences. All are graduate students advised by Zhongming Liu, an assistant professor of biomedical and electrical and computer engineering.