News & Events

Katherine Pratt Honored with NSF Research Fellowship

UW EE graduate student Katherine Pratt has been awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Out of more than 16,500 applications, 2,000 recipients were selected. The award brings the total number of students with NSF Graduate Research Fellowships in the BioRobotics Lab alone to three, with Pratt joining previous recipients Kevin Huang and Andrew Haddock.

Recipients are selected based on their potential to make significant contributions to the engineering and science fields. The prestigious award provides three years of financial support including an annual stipend and cost-of-education allowance for research that leads to a master’s or Ph.D. degree.

Pratt graduated in 2008 from MIT with a degree in aerospace engineering. She worked at Blue Origin in systems engineering prior to entering active duty as an officer in the U.S. Air Force. Most of her service was spent at Edwards AFB as a member of the operational test team for the F-35; she concentrated on pilot systems and cockpit integration. After leaving the military, Pratt worked with Adrian KC Lee at UW (LABS^N), running spatio-temporal behavioral, EEG and M/EEG experiments. For the past academic year she has been a participant in the NSF Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering's program that facilitates veterans returning to academia.

Pratt's current work with Professor Howard Chizeck is in the BioRobotics Lab, developing touchscreen control using EMG and other neural signals for individuals without sufficient finger dexterity to operate smart phones, tablets and similar devices. Read more about her research in the annual research review, EEK 2015.

Congratulations also to Andrew Hill, a UW Bioengineering undergraduate alumni who worked in the BioRobotics Lab from 2010-12. Hill is now a UW graduate student in Genome Sciences.

See Also:

News & Events  
EE logo