Eugene M. Isenberg Awards
2008 Isenberg Award Recipients Pictured back row (left to right): Ben Ransford (NSM); Nikhil Malvankar (NSM); Dr. Soren Bisgaard, Eugene M. Isenberg Professor of Technology Management; Mr. Eugene M. Isenberg '50; Dr. Michael F.Malone, Ronnie and Eugene Isenberg Distinguished Professor of Engineering and Dean, College of Engineering and Jason Gabish (ISOM). Front row (left to right): Xuan Huang (ISOM); Shilpi Sanghi (NSM); Kavita Radhakrishnan (Nursing); Damla Koylu (NSM); Abigail Guce (NSM) and Andrea Gomez-Escudero (NSM).
2008-2009 List of Recipients
Jason Gabisch
Isenberg School of Management
Jason is a Ph.D. candidate in marketing in the Isenberg School of Management. Through corporate consulting internships as an MBA student at the University of New Hampshire, Jason participated in business plan development, sales forecasting, licensing, and commercialization of new products, including a process for capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. He has further developed analytical research skills by assisting professors with research evaluating IT project failures.
As an Isenberg Scholar, Jason will continue his current research, which explores challenges that marketing managers and engineers face in communicating with each other across firms in strategic alliances. Managing knowledge transfer across firms, he notes, is crucial, especially in coordinating supply chains. The Isenberg Award will provide Jason with support in collecting data, attending conferences, and taking courses outside his discipline.
Jason has three degrees from the University of New Hampshire in Durham: an MBA, a B.S. in business administration, and a B.A. in political science.
Andrea Gomez-Escudero
College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics
A third-year Ph.D. candidate in chemistry, Andrea focuses on analytical chemistry; her research involves development of mass spectrometry-based analytical techniques using dendrimers for the analysis of peptides and proteins. Before arriving at UMass, she worked for three years in a water analysis company in her home country, Colombia, where she was responsible for the quality of a water supply for 450,000 people and developed strategies for training water treatment operators.
As an Isenberg Scholar, Andrea plans to complement her technical knowledge with an understanding of technology management. That will include obtaining a strong foundation as a chemist along with training as a manager of projects, groups, and associations. The Isenberg Award will ultimately allow her to combine research with advising companies and governments on natural resource management issues. With her interdisciplinary training, she hopes to the communication gap between business people and scientists—to balance conflicts stemming from social interests, such as management and environmental needs.
Andrea received her B.S. in chemistry from the University of Quindio in Armenia, Colombia, where she subsequently served for a year as an assistant professor. She also worked in Colombia as a laboratory chemistry analyst for three years.
Abigail Guce
College of Natural Science and Mathematics
A Ph.D. candidate in chemistry, Abigail is studying the human protein, alpha-galactosidase, that, when deficient, causes Fabry Disease. Her work explores the relationship between the stability of the alpha-Gal enzyme under the treatment, currently in clinical trial, known as Pharmacological Chaperone Therapy. Using x-ray crystallography and biophysical analyses, to evaluate the therapy, Abigail foresees her research as useful in managing Fabry Disease. She also believes that it may serve as a model system for analysis of other pharmacological chaperone candidates involving other diseases.
Abigail will use the Isenberg Award to attend local and international conferences in her field. She has enrolled in a drug design course that includes seminars from pharmaceutical scientists who relate science and technology to business and company policy. To enhance her understanding of the commercial prospects for her research, she will take courses at the Isenberg School, including those related to technology management and entrepreneurship.
Abigail earned a B.S. degree in chemistry from the University of the Philippines in Quezon City. She has worked as a chemist in several laboratories, including the DNA Sequencing Core Laboratory at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City and at the CRL Environmental Corporation in the Philippines.
Xuan Huang
Isenberg School of Management
A Ph.D. student in management science at the Isenberg School, Xuan, who is also pursuing a master’s degree in statistics, views quality management as her research field. Xuan has worked on the effect of autocorrelation in binary data and related consequences for attribute data. She has also worked on multivariate time series techniques with application to operations management, finance, and economics.
As an Isenberg Scholar, Xuan plans to complement her technical progress with facility in devising creative management strategies. To date, her work has emphasized formulating operations management problems using statistical models. She plans to translate her solutions in mathematical language back to a managerial language. She also plans to “learn the learning process” in quality management so that she can readily adapt her work to the wide range of industries that quality management serves.
In addition to her Ph.D. and master’s degree programs, Xuan holds a B.E. degree in automatic control from Tsinghua University in Beijing.
Damla Koylu
College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics
A Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Polymer Science and Engineering, Damla describes her overall project goal as the exploration of brush-modified surface chemistry. Since joining her department in 2004 as a master’s degree student, she has made two discoveries with possible commercial applications. The first is an antibacterial coating for surfaces—safe for humans—which prevents bacteria from surviving and reproducing. The second is a coating for surfaces that can oscillate between repelling and attracting water, with potential applications in biochips, controllable drug release, and intelligent devices.
Damla will use her Isenberg Award to develop entrepreneurial and other business skills. The scholarship will allow her to reduce her teaching load, freeing her to take marketing management, productions operations management, and other graduate-level business courses. Damla, who has applied for a patent for one of her laboratory discoveries, plans to integrate her technological knowledge with business skills and increasing business experience.
Damla earned an M.S. degree from her current department in 2005. She holds a B.S. degree in chemistry form Bogazici University in Istanbul.
Nikhil Malvankar
College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics
A Ph.D. candidate in physics, Nikhil is working on an interdisciplinary project involving microbial fuel cells with the departments of physics and microbiology. He is also collaborating with chemists, polymer scientists, and engineers on campus in studying the electrical properties of the power-producing bacterium genus, Geobacter. In that research, Nikhil discovered that biofilms can be electrically conductive and act as high-value capacitors. These findings, he notes, are attractive because biofilms can be synthesized from relatively inexpensive food stocks, and when alive, can self-repair and replicate.
The Isenberg Award will allow Nikhil to further his understanding of the commercialization process of laboratory innovations. Three patents, he observes, have been filed for microbial fuel cell technologies developed in his lab. Nikhil plans to take supporting business courses and workshops as well as attending international symposiums and conferences. He also plans to participate in the campus-wide Technology Innovation Challenge.
Nikhil received an M.S. degree in physics from UMass Amherst in 2007. He holds an M.Sc. in physics from the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay and a B.Sc. in physics from the University of Mumbai.
Kavita Radhakrishnan
School of Nursing
A Ph.D. candidate in the School of Nursing since September 2007, Kavita brings a background as a telecommunications engineer and a registered nurse to her pursuit of becoming an educator in the nursing profession. As a Ph.D. student she plans to conduct multidisciplinary research emphasizing telehealth, the delivery of health-related services and information via telecommunications and information technology. Telenursing—i.e., telehealth applied to nursing—involves interaction with other medical and nonmedical applications, including telediagnosis, teleconsultation, telemonitoring, and the collection and analysis of data in medical decision making.
As an Isenberg Scholar, Kavita will undertake a dissertation that evaluates the effectiveness of telehealth processes for home healthcare business applications. The award will allow her to pursue interdisciplinary studies including a summer course—Business of Healthcare Informatics—at Oregon State Health and Sciences University.
While completing a curriculum that includes telehealth applications, technologies, and issues, Kavita plans to gain home healthcare experience by working as a home healthcare nurse.
Kavita holds a B.S. degree in nursing from UMass Amherst. She also holds two other degrees: an M.S. in electrical engineering fro the University of Texas-Arlington and a bachelor’s (B.E.) in electronics engineering from the University of Bombay. She has worked as an R.N. at Bay State Medical Center since 2006.
Benjamin Ransford
College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics
Now in the first year of an M.S./Ph.D. program in computer science at UMass Amherst, Benjamin is focusing his research on the security and privacy properties of implantable medical devices. His recent paper, Pacemakers and Implantable Cardiac Defibrillators: Software radio Attacks and Zero-Power Defenses, coauthored with a group of fellow researchers, gained considerable attention in both academe and the national press. Ben brings a background in high-technology entrepreneurship to the academic world. His start-ups include a web design company, an e-commerce site that sold Linux video games, and a software consultancy that he later transformed into a speech software company.
Benjamin’s Isenberg Award will allow him to take a technology management course to formalize the knowledge that he has gained as an entrepreneur. He also plans to conduct independent study into economics and entrepreneurship. And he hopes to develop an entrepreneurship talk to deliver to peers. With the award, he aims to become, through further study and practice, a better manager of projects, companies, and himself.
Benjamin holds a B.Sc in computer science from Cornell University. In addition to developing his own start-up businesses, Benjamin worked for D.E. Shaw & Co in New York City as a systems administrator and developer of productivity and MIS tools.
Shilpi Sanghi
College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics
A Ph.D. candidate in polymer science and engineering, Shilpi focuses on the synthesis and characterization of polymers that can be used to generate membranes for fuel cells. (The membranes exhibit high conductivity over a broad range of temperature and relative humidity.) Shilpi understands the scientific side of fuel cells; she wants to complement that with an understanding of the commercial aspects of bringing a technology to market.
With her Isenberg Award, Shilpi plans to take courses in technology management, leadership communication, product management, and marketing management. She plans to leverage the skills gained in those courses in product development based on her research.
Shilpi earned an M.S. degree in 2007 from her current academic department. She also holds a B.Tech degree in polymer engineering and technology from the University of Chemical Technology in Mumbai, where she was also a research assistant. She has held industry internships with Indofil Chemicals in Thane, India and with Asahi India Glass in Rewari, India.
Click here to view a list of previous award recipients.