The Story Collider Presents: Stories from University of Virginia
The Story Collider is delighted to partner with The University of Virginia for a special event on Carr’s Hill.
Join us on April 9th to hear true, personal science stories from four prominent UVA STEM figures.
Hosted by Misha Gajewski and Shane Hanlon.
This event is by invitation only.
Stories by:
Dr. Madhur Behl is an associate professor in the departments of Computer Science, and Systems and Information Engineering, and a member of the Cyber-Physical Systems Link Lab at the University of Virginia. He conducts research at the confluence of Machine Learning, Predictive Control, and Artificial Intelligence with applications in Cyber-Physical Systems, Autonomous Systems, Robotics, and Smart Cities. Examples include: fully autonomous racing at the limits of control (Agile Autonomy), safety of autonomous vehicles (Safe Autonomy), building world models for robotics, data predictive control for flooding in coastal cities, and AI for building energy optimization. He is the team principal of the University of Virginia's Cavalier Autonomous Racing team - racing full-scale, fully autonomous Indy cars (HTTPS://AUTONOMOUSRACING.DEV/). Behl is also the co-founder, organizer, and the race director for the F1/10 (F1tenth) International Autonomous Racing Competitions. He is an Associate Editor for the SAE Journal on Connected and Autonomous Vehciles, and a Guest Editor for the Journal of Field Robotics. He also serves on the on the Academic Advisory Council of the Partners for Automated Vehicle Education (PAVE) campaign, to help promote public understanding about autonomous vehicles and their potential benefits. Dr. Behl is an IEEE Senior Member and the recipient of the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award (2021). He received his Ph.D. (2015) and M.S. (2012), in Electrical and Systems Engineering, both from the University of Pennsylvania; and his bachelor's degree (2009) in ECE from PEC University of Technology in India.
A nationally known researcher in the field of vascular surgery and the former Chair of the Department of Surgery at the University of North Carolina (UNC), Melina R. Kibbe, MD, began her five-year appointment as UVA School of Medicine’s Dean and Chief Health Affairs Officer in September 2021. She is James Carroll Flippin Professor of Medical Science, Professor of Surgery and Professor of Biomedical Engineering, without term. Read about her first year as dean. Prior to UNC, Dr. Kibbe was Vice Chair of Research in the Department of Surgery and Deputy Director of the Simpson Querrey Institute for BioNanotechnology at Northwestern University. Clinically, she has significant experience with both open and endovascular surgery, including the treatment of carotid stenosis, peripheral vascular disease, abdominal aortic aneurysms and vascular access. She is board certified in general and vascular surgery and is a Registered Vascular Technologist and a Registered Physician in Vascular Interpretation. Dr. Kibbe’s research interests focus on developing novel therapies for patients with vascular disease while simultaneously studying the mechanism of how these therapies impact the vascular wall. She has been funded as a principal investigator by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Department of Defense and Department of Veterans Affairs, in addition to serving as co-investigator and/or consultant on several other NIH and Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute awards. She is a strong advocate for sex inclusion in biomedical research. She holds more than 10 patents or provisional patents. Her research was recognized by President Obama with the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 2009. A member of the National Academy of Medicine and the American Society for Clinical Investigation, Dr. Kibbe is the Editor-in-Chief for JAMA Surgery and has served as president for the Association for Academic Surgery, the Midwestern Vascular Surgical Society, and the Association of Veterans Affairs Surgeons. She is co-founder and Chief Medical Officer of VesselTek BioMedical, LLC, which specializes in the development of medical devices to treat vascular disease. Dr. Kibbe graduated from the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine; completed her internship, residency, and research fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center; and completed her vascular surgery fellowship at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.
Karen McGlathery is Director of the Environmental Resilience Institute and Professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia. She is also Director of the Virginia Coast Reserve Long Term Ecological Research program, a collaboration of eight universities and 25 researchers funded by the U.S. government to understand how climate impacts coastal communities. She has previously held positions as Associate Vice President for Research at the University of Virginia, and visiting scholar at the University of Copenhagen and the National Environmental Research institute in Denmark. Her research focuses on the effects of climate change, nutrient pollution and species invasions on seagrass, seaweed and salt marsh ecosystems. Based on long-term research on carbon sequestration in restored seagrass meadows, her group wrote the international protocol for issuing carbon credits for seagrass restoration in the voluntary carbon market and their work led to government legislation in Virginia to allow carbon offset trading for seagrass restoration. In addition to Virginia, she and her students have worked in New England, Florida, Bermuda, Denmark, New Zealand, and Mozambique.
David Nichols: Currently, I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physicsat the University of Virginia (UVA) in Charlottesville. My appointment began at the end of July of 2019 and my profile on the UVA Physics Department’s webpage can be accessed here. From July 2018 to July 2019, I was a senior postdoctoral researcher in the Gravitation Astroparticle Physics Amsterdam (GRAPPA) institute at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) in The Netherlands. I was part of the gravitational-waves research group there, which is being led by Associate Prof. Samaya Nissanke. From September 2016 to June 2018, I was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Astrophysics at Radboud University (RU) in Nijmegen in The Netherlands. The Department of Astrophysics is part of the larger Institute for Mathematics, Astrophysics, and Particle Physics (IMAPP) at Radboud. My research adviser there was also Associate Prof. Samaya Nissanke. Before moving to The Netherlands, I was a postdoctoral research associate working in the research group of Prof. Eanna E. Flanaganat Cornell University. I worked in the Cornell Center for Astrophysics and Planetary Science (CCAPS), which is affiliated with the Department of Astronomy. I held my position at Cornell between September 2012 and August 2016. Prior to my postdoc at Cornell, I worked on my Ph.D. in the theoretical astrophysics group (TAPIR) at Caltech. My doctoral advisor was Prof. Yanbei Chen, and I also worked closely with Emeritus Prof. Kip S. Thorne. I graduated in June 2012, and I spent the summer as a postdoc finishing up some remaining projects from my Ph.D. My undergraduate studies took place at Claremont McKenna College (CMC), where I majored in both mathematics and physics. My senior thesis research was in the field of mathematical biology, and it was guided by Prof. John Milton. I graduated in June 2006.