Five Eberly graduate students honored with research and excellence awards
Five graduate students in the Penn State Eberly College of Science have been selected by the J. Jeffery and Ann Marie Fox Graduate School to receive awards for their research and excellence. Chad Brunswick, Shreya Mathela, and Shio Sakon have been selected alongside 13 other graduate students across the University to receive the Alumni Association Dissertation Award. Jasmeen Khosa and Megan von Abo were among five other graduate students to receive the Professional Master’s Excellence Award. These awards are among some of the most prestigious awards given to graduate students at Penn State.
The Alumni Association Dissertation Award was made possible through a gift from the Penn State Alumni Association and provides funding and recognition to outstanding full-time doctor of philosophy students whose dissertations will have the greatest impact. These students have also demonstrated outstanding academic and personal potential in the areas of extracurricular and professional activities. The award, comprised of a certificate and a medal, is considered to be among the most prestigious available to Penn State graduate students and recognizes outstanding professional accomplishment and achievement in scholarly research in any of the disciplinary areas.
The Professional Master’s Excellence Award recognizes individual student excellence in a professional master’s degree program. These students demonstrate outstanding breadth of experience, performance, and professional projects or work.
Chad Brunswick
Chad Brunswick is a neuroscience doctoral student in the lab of Janine Kwapis, Paul Berg Early Career Professor in the Biological Sciences. Brunswick’s research focuses on understanding why memory updating is impaired in old age. By studying how memories are encoded and allocated to sparse neuronal ensembles, groups of neurons that engage in repeated patterns of activity within the brain, Brunswick is able to test how these ensembles change during memory updating and how age impacts this process. His findings have implications for memory care and the development of future therapies for Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias. Understanding how memories are modified within the brain is also of interest in the treatment of psychiatric disorders where memories have become more harmful than helpful, such as in obsessive-compulsive disorders and post-traumatic stress disorders.
Brunswick has received many awards for his research and presentation skills including a National Institutes of Health National Research Service Award Fellowship, the Robb Family Graduate Fellowship, and the Best Student Poster Award at the annual meeting of the Pavlovian Society. He has also held numerous service positions including the vice president of the Huck Graduate Student Advisory Committee and a student liaison for the Penn State Neuroscience Institute.
“Chad is a top-notch scientist whose dissertation research is clever, innovative, and will make a major impact on the field and hopefully, ultimately make an impact on society to improve cognition in old age,” said Kwapis in a nomination letter. “It is fair to say that Chad has not only had an enormous impact on my lab, but he has also impacted the field of neuroscience, the biology department, the Eberly College of Science, and Penn State more broadly.”
Shreya Mathela
Shreya Mathela is a chemistry doctoral student in the lab of John Asbury, professor of chemistry, where she investigates how the chemistry of atomically thin semiconductors influences their performance in real devices. Her work establishes design principles that connect how these materials are made to how they perform, helping build a unified framework. Mathela’s work engages collaborators in chemistry, materials science, and physics. Her research has implications for more advanced data storage, flexible devices, efficient electronics that find, detect, and emit light, and future quantum technologies.
Beyond her research, Mathela has led scientific community-building efforts at Penn State. She served as co-chair of the Graduate Women in Science’s Empower Conference, an annual event supporting women in STEM, and contributed to student advocacy through roles in the Chemistry Graduate Student Association and the Chemistry Climate and Diversity Committee.
“Shreya is a genuine scholar,” said Asbury in a nomination letter. “She combines deep intellectual curiosity, rigorous experimental capability, and passion [in her research]. Shreya has approached her graduate studies truly as an independent scientist able to design her own experiments and test her own hypotheses while keeping the bigger picture in mind of the impact that her work can have on the field.”
Shio Sakon
Shio Sakon is a physics doctoral student working with Chad Hanna, distinguished professor of physics and of astronomy and astrophysics and co-hire of the Institute for Computational and Data Sciences. Sakon develops and operates methods to detect gravitational wave signals from binary systems of black holes and neutron stars in our universe that orbit and merge. These waves are created when black holes and neutron stars orbit. Through her research, she has advanced how gravitational waves can be used to further understand our universe, including probes of exotic compact-objects, such as objects made of dark matter.
Sakon has served as a leader in the broader scientific community, including in the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration, the international scientific partnership advancing gravitational wave research using observatory data, where she was selected to co-lead the collaboration’s paper-writing team for sub-solar mass searches. She has also participated in numerous outreach activities including the Gravitational Wave Summer Camp for high school students and Physics and Astronomy for Women outreach programs for elementary school students.
“[Sakon’s] work will fundamentally advance gravitational wave astronomy, potentially discover new physics, and establish methodologies that will be used for decades,” said Hanna in a nomination letter. “Overall Shio’s record in graduate school at Penn State has been phenomenal, I don’t know how she does it, but she continues to be among the most productive students I have ever mentored.”
Jasmeen Khosa
Jasmeen Khosa is a forensic science master of professional studies student. Khosa is also a researcher on a project funded by the National Institute of Justice to help sequence 10,000 human whole mitochondrial genomes. This study is the first to undertake mitochondrial genome sequencing at this magnitude within a forensic context. In addition to her research, Khosa has also served as a teaching assistant for microbiology and cellular and molecular biology classes.
“[Khosa] is driven, focused, and prepares well for everything she does,” said Mitchell M. Holland, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology and of forensic science. “She is a pleasure to work with and serves as a positive influence in my research laboratory.”
Megan von Abo
Megan von Abo is an integrated undergraduate-graduate master of biotechnology student in the Eberly College of Science and the Schreyer Honors College. Von Abo has participated in research in the lab of Janine Kwapis since 2022. In the Kwapis Lab, she has worked independently on a project studying different variants of the circadian clock gene, Period1, and their distinct roles in either circadian function or memory processes. Von Abo has also served in numerous leadership roles including as the president of Science LionPride, Penn State’s student ambassadors for the Eberly College of Science, a leadership intern in the Schreyer Honors College for college operations, and a teaching assistant for multiple biotechnology classes.
“[Von Abo] is an incredibly impressive…and I fully expect she will be a rising star in the field,” said Kwapis. “Megan has already been on multiple publications from my laboratory, a track record that speaks to her scholarship, writing skills, and ability to work with others.”