The Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has announced the recipients of its 2025 Graduate Fellowships. The institute is renowned for fostering interdisciplinary research across engineering, biology, cognitive science, and computation. The Beckman Institute Graduate Fellowship is a competitive program supported by the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation, that provides financial support and professional development to graduate students conducting innovative, cross-disciplinary research that aligns with the institute’s collaborative mission.
One of this year’s fellows is Rita Huan-Ting Peng, a Ph.D. student in Bioengineering and a member of the Illinois-Carle Joint Neural Engineering and Rehabilitation Laboratory (JNERL). Peng’s research focuses on stroke rehabilitation, aiming to improve outcomes for the more than 700,000 individuals affected by stroke each year in the United States. She is developing a dynamic model to estimate the balance between excitatory and inhibitory neurons in the brain which are two forces critical to neural signaling. Unlike current methods that are limited to small brain regions, her model will enable full-brain activity mapping. By combining this approach with artificial intelligence, she seeks to identify patterns of abnormal brain activity in stroke patients, offering insights into stroke pathology and helping to design more personalized treatment strategies.
Receiving the Beckman Fellowship highlights both the quality and the interdisciplinary nature of Peng’s work. It also reflects the significance of JNERL’s mission to integrate engineering, neuroscience, and clinical practice to advance personalized neurorehabilitation.
Read the full announcement here:
https://beckman.illinois.edu/news/article/2025/06/02/meet-the-2025-beckman-institute-graduate-fellows