We are proud to announce the 2022–2023 cohort of Barbour Scholars. Established by Levi Barbour in 1917, the Barbour Scholarship supports women from Asia and the Middle East who have come to the University of Michigan in pursuit of an advanced degree. This year’s cohort marks 105 years of academic excellence across a breadth of disciplines, and we are excited to welcome them to a global community of women leaders.
Rackham Graduate School welcomes the following students into the prestigious Barbour community:
Zhe (Ashley) Jian
Ph.D. Candidate, Electrical and Computer Engineering
My Work
The need for efficient power generation, distribution, and delivery is quickly expanding in different sectors of industry. Power electronics are at the heart of this industrial revolution, which can be found in various applications ranging from solar inverters, electric vehicles, and motor servos. Gallium Oxide (Ga2O3) is emerging as an attractive semiconductor for high-power switching applications. My doctoral research is focused on addressing three critical issues in Ga2O3-based device technology. (i) Thermal stability of Schottky contacts for Ga2O3 to enable high power applications in harsh environments. (ii) A robust MOCVD AlSiO dielectric to take full advantage of high breakdown field of Ga2O3. (iii) Heterogeneous integration of Ga2O3 and GaN substrates. In order to address some of the main drawbacks of Ga2O3, such as its relatively low electron mobility and the unavailability of p-type doping, I demonstrated, for the first time, successful direct bonding of GaN and Ga2O3.
The Impact of the Barbour Scholarship
The Barbour Scholarship supports me to work on my dissertation to improve the efficiency of high-power electronics for better energy security and sustainability. It will play a key role in shaping me into a successful female researcher and inspire me to motivate more female students to pursue academic careers and to participate in advancing the world through state-of-the-art research.
Future Plans
For the future, I would like to make more novel research contributions on wide bandgap based power devices characterized by high-efficiency performance, smaller and lighter modules, as well as lower and greener power dissipation, with the goal of leading a revolution in the power electronics industry and making a positive impact on technology and society.
Charlotte Chun Lam Yiu
Ph.D. Candidate, Asian Languages and Cultures
My Work
My project explores the imagination of home in early modern China through studying a set of five seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Chinese domestic novels. By examining the architecture of the residences portrayed in each of the novels, I conceptualize the domestic novel as a subgenre based on their shared chronotope. Additionally, I have identified two major literary trends of development within this subgenre. First, it saw a gradual shift from depictions of eclectic combinations of rituals to a more purist Confucianist use of them. More outrageous propriety transgressions moved toward an increasing compliance with architectural and ritualistic boundaries. Second, the household organizations expanded from families of fewer than two generations to full-blown lineage compounds. The implications of these shifts include more regular ritual activities, increased collective resources and responsibilities, and a redefined sense of membership and group consciousness. In other words, the meaning of a household transformed from a macrocosm of the self into a microcosm of larger levels of society.
The Impact of the Barbour Scholarship
The fact that the Barbour Scholarship recognizes women of diverse, international backgrounds helps me utter my complex and subtle relationships with my home-city, Hong Kong. And it is in line with my perennial research interests and focuses: the definitions and conceptualizations of “home,” be it in premodern China or modern Hong Kong.
Future Plans
I aspire to be a scholar-professor. And I would like to continue doing what I have been doing—translating Hong Kong and preserving her fading culture.
Jane Im
Ph.D. Candidate, Joint Program in Information and Computer Science and Engineering
My Work
Social platforms’ integrity problems, including online harassment and surveillance, cause harm to users’ safety and agency. To tackle such issues, I research how consent can be better incorporated into platform design. First, I introduced a feminist theoretical framework of affirmative consent, an enthusiastic form of agreement, as a foundation for designing safer social systems. Then, I research how affirmative consent can be baked into social systems’ business models, privacy features, and governance. Using empirical studies, I investigate how business models and privacy features should be designed so that people can enthusiastically engage with platforms. Finally, I research how democratic online governance can be built grounded in affirmative consent, as many platforms have centralized corporate governance that fails to protect users’ safety.
The Impact of the Barbour Scholarship
The scholarship will help me focus solely on my research as I won’t have to take teaching responsibilities for one year. The recognition is also a great encouragement for me to continue pursuing the research direction I believe in and keep my voice as an Asian woman scholar.
Future Plans
Recently, I’ve become increasingly interested in pursuing a career in academia, so I plan to apply to tenure track faculty jobs in the U.S. and South Korea and see how it works out. Wherever I go, I aspire to play a role in improving academia’s culture for junior researchers, especially those from marginalized groups who often face burdens in navigating academia. This is somewhat of a personal goal, as I wished we Ph.D. students had more mentors that advocated for us during our Ph.D. work.
Jie Cao
Ph.D. Candidate, Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics
Her Work
My research focuses on developing and validating clinical machine learning models for early prediction of acute kidney injury (AKI), using data from electronic health records. The main goal is to identify and address issues in clinical model implementation, especially in model generalizability. Existing models are often developed locally at a single institution, lacking sufficient validation and population diversity. Some critical information is excluded due to its limited availability. In this dissertation, I reproduce and validate the transferability of an existing AKI model via transfer learning, explore the role of urine output in AKI prediction, and train a scalable AKI model utilizing multi-center data without compromising privacy in a federated stacked learning framework.
The Impact of the Barbour Scholarship
With the scholarship, I will have more time in the final year to focus on and finish my dissertation work, and in the meantime, explore professional development opportunities. Getting the scholarship is a recognition of the achievement I have made. It motivates me to work harder and go firmly in the direction of my planned career path.
Future Plans
Upon graduation, I anticipate working as a research scientist focusing on analyzing medical big data with the hope that models will land on actual clinical practice. I am also interested in contributing my knowledge to provide systemic data solutions for healthcare systems, pharmaceutical companies, and government, with the help of artificial intelligence.
Mimansa Jaiswal
Ph.D. Candidate, Computer Science and Engineering
My Work
My present research interests lie in the topics that fall under the umbrella of Robust and Interpretable Human Centered Computing. I work in the area of robust and interpretable systems for social signal processing using natural language understanding and speech processing for various problems, such as conversation and discourse analysis, emotion modeling, etc. I am primarily interested in understanding what causes the state-of-the-art machine learning models to fail [Failure Analysis of ML models] or perform differently than expected [Evaluation of ML models]. How can these failure points be used by an expert [Model Testing and Debugging] and predictions be explained to a general audience [Model Explanation]? How can we train or tune these models such that they do not learn about certain variables [Robust and Private ML models], and how can these models benefit from known human knowledge [Expert Informed Machine Learning or Human-in-the-Loop ML]?
The Impact of the Barbour Scholarship
The Barbour Scholarship will not only help me continue my research with a broadened scope of freedom, but will also allow me to have access to more root level problems in depth as well as the resources required to tackle them.
Future Plans
I want to specifically work in the area of improving the translucency of machine learning models. Something that helps understand why particular “machine decisions” are made is specifically useful for my home country where there are a million people, providing an unclean dataset, as well as a significant resource allocation and societal movement depending on these assigned decisions.
Renke Tan
Ph.D. Candidate, Biological Chemistry
My Work
The goal of my thesis is to harness compact Type I CIRSPR (aka CRISPR-Cas3) systems into robust genome editing tools. My work describes the first adoption of a minimal CRISPR-Cas3 from Neisseria lactamica (Nla), for creating targeted large deletions in the human genome. Unexpectedly, NlaCascade assembly in bacteria requires bacterial internal translation of a hidden component, Cas11, from within the cas8 gene. In addition, my thesis work also uncovered that expressing a separately encoded NlaCas11 in human cells is the key to enable plasmid and mRNA-based gene editing for divergent compact CRISPR-Cas3 systems. Lastly, my thesis will focus on profiling the genome editing outcomes for the compact CRISPR-Cas3 editors using unbiased high-throughput sequencing methods.
The Impact of the Barbour Scholarship
I feel inspired by the profound history of the Barbour Scholarship, as well as the stories from the fellow Barbour Scholars. I believe this will help shape me into a better scholar, and use my story and voice to encourage more female scientists.
Future Plans
I wish to join a research group developing CRISPR based new therapeutic approaches and help people with previously untreatable diseases. Meanwhile, I hope to contribute to the public engagement, outreach, and education, as well as policy making about bioethical rules in terms of genome editing.
Yun Chen
Ph.D. Candidate, Social Work and Anthropology
My Work
My research investigates how people make “social work”—a Western import—in contemporary urban China, and what roles “social work” plays in (re)configuring subjects and social orders in post-Mao Chinese society. In particular, my project grounds this question empirically by examining how “social work” gradually claims its space of practice for managing a particular problem domain—illicit drug use. By ethnographically examining how people enact “social work” that (re)defines and intervenes with the problematics of “illicit drug use” in everyday practices, and how such practices have changed pre-existing patterns of coordination across different institutional actors in the “anti-drug” field, my project explores how these anti-drug social work practices envision and shape new notions of Chinese persons, as well as how they reconfigure the logic, ethics, and practicalities of local social ordering. This project also aims to better understand the indigenization of social work and drug addiction interventions in ways that have bearing for the advancement of service practice and public policy in China.
The Impact of the Barbour Scholarship
The Barbour Scholarship allows me to primarily focus on data analysis and dissertation writing in the final year of my doctoral study. Being recognized by a scholarship that specifically supports female scholars from Asia and the Middle East further encourages me to continue pursuing my research goals.
Future Plans
As an interdisciplinary and international scholar, my career goal is to become an anthropology-infused social work researcher and educator who can facilitate intellectual dialogues on social work that promote more plural, critical, culturally-informed, and locally-situated scholarship in the field.
Weican Zuo
Ph.D. Candidate, Architecture
My Work
As housing prices soar and economic disparities increase across urban China, Chinese cities implement affordable housing policies and programs under the strong directives of the central government to provide decent homes for their growing populations. In 2007, the Chinese central government introduced an inclusionary housing scheme, which requires or encourages private developers to provide a certain percentage of public rental housing units in new market-rate housing projects, as a local means to increase affordable housing provision without direct public subsidy. My dissertation aims to investigate how the inclusionary housing scheme works in a typical Chinese city against the backdrop of China’s pursuing a “harmonious society.” To what extent does inclusionary housing serve as a social developmental tool that helps to reduce housing inequality and foster social inclusion in Chinese cities? The study will reveal rationales underlying inclusionary housing strategy, examine how it is implemented and the interrelationships among different actors, and most importantly, explore policy outcomes and how they are perceived by the residents.
The Impact of the Barbour Scholarship
The Barbour Scholarship will support me to complete data collection and data analysis in the next academic year and move on to the dissertation writing phase. It will also support my career goal of promoting interdisciplinary research and architecture education in China and inspire the next generation of women students to succeed in their academic and professional careers.
Future Plans
After I graduate from the University of Michigan, I envision myself pursuing an academic career in China. I will use the expertise that I have built in my doctoral studies to address the urgent social concerns related to housing. Through collaboration with other researchers, designers, and planners, my research will generate insights on how to make housing more inclusive and equitable.