Senior Sandya Subramanian Awarded Churchill Scholarship

Sandya Subramanian

Sandya Subramanian, a Johns Hopkins senior from Grand Rapids, Michigan, has won the prestigious Winston Churchill Foundation Scholarship for graduate study at the University of Cambridge in England.

Each year, fourteen U.S. students are awarded graduate scholarships by the foundation. Selection is based on outstanding creative accomplishment and future promise in the fields of science, mathematics, and engineering.

A double major in biomedical engineering and applied mathematics and statistics, Subramanian will pursue a PhD and a career in research, in the field of computational neuroscience. During her Churchill Scholarship year, she will earn a Master of Philosophy degree at Cambridge and conduct lab research in the Department of Clinical Neurosciences.

Since arriving at Johns Hopkins, Subramanian has worked for three years in the lab of Srivedi V. Sarma, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the Institute for Computational Medicine. She initially approached Sarma as a freshman with little research experience, but quickly proved her talent and skill, helping to develop new inroads to the understanding and treatment of drug-resistant epilepsy. The undergraduate is now co-author on a patent with Sarma, and is busily writing a manuscript of her own original study, in which she has been able to demonstrate how the nodes of the epileptogenic zone (EZ) are connected in the brain’s network, during a seizure. This study promises to lead to a more accurate and reliable algorithm for identifying the EZ, work that will ultimately aid clinicians in resecting smaller areas of the brain, therefore limiting brain damage in surgical subjects.

Established in 1959 by American friends of the British Prime Minister, The Winston Churchill Foundation of the United States seeks to recognize, through its scholarship, Churchill’s post-war appreciation for the sciences, as well as his desire for the presence of talented young Americans at Churchill College, University of Cambridge.

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