Congratulations to Jiazhen Hong and Ashwini Subramanian, both advised by Professor Laleh Najafizadeh, for receiving the SGS Research & Conference Travel Award and Rutgers BHI Travel Award and SGS Research & Conference Travel Award and the Best Poster Achievement at the Second Annual Rutgers Conference for Rising Stars in Graduate Research respectively.
Jiazhen Hong is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rutgers University, working with Professor Laleh Najafizadeh. His research focuses on brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), machine learning, signal processing, and large language models (LLMs). Meanwhile, Jiazhen is a part-time research intern at Emotiv Research, where he works on EEG foundation models and long-sequence time-series signal modeling.
Jiazhen's will be using these awards to present the paper "TopoEEG: a TimeSformer-Based Topographic Image Representation Method for Single-Trial Early Detection of P300" at The IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI 2025), taking place on April 14–17, 2025, in Texas, USA.
Ashwini Subramanian received her Bachelor's degree in Electronics and Instrumentation Technology from Visvesvaraya Technological University in India and Master's degree in Electrical Engineering from Southern Methodist University in Texas. She is currently pursuing a doctoral degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rutgers University. Her research focuses on analyzing neurological signals and designing machine learning models for brain-computer interface applications.
Ashwini has received the 2024-2025 Research & Conference Travel Award from the School of Graduate Studies (SGS). This award will enable her to present her research paper, "DETECTING PAIN DURING COGNITIVE TASKS VIA VISIBILITY GRAPHS OF CORTICAL SIGNALS," at the IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI) in Houston, Texas, April 2025. ISBI is a leading conference focusing on computational biomedical imaging.
Additionally, Ashwini secured first place for the Best Poster Achievement at the second annual Rutgers Conference for Rising Stars in Graduate Research, 2025, for her poster "Enabling Pain Detection and Intervention in BCI-Assisted Communication". This conference is a university-wide showcase for PhD student research.
Join us in congratulating Jiazhen and Ashwini on their achievements!
