A West High School student who worked under ECE Professor Rajesh Menon is being highlighted by the College of Health at the University of Utah.
The Salt Lake City student, Aadhi Umamageswaran, worked with a team that included Electrical and Computer Engineering’s Professor Menon and Electronic Technician Ryan Manwill.
Umamageswaran’s was part of a project called “Streamlining Pix2Pix Model for Miniaturized Hyperspectral Microscope with Bimolecular Localization Applications” during the UCREW Summer Research Internship.
The student spotlight is part of recognition by faculty who helped to save a program, Utah Cultivating Research (UCREW), after a funding setback.
The program provides to students a hands-on opportunity in health research and technology. The effort with UCREW and faculty can shape a high school student’s academic and career goals, the College of Health said.
Umamageswaran joined UCREW with “a passion for AI and personal connection to health challenges,” according to the College of Health website.
“My family has a long history of diabetes and kidney disease,” Umamageswaran explains. “I wanted to combine AI and medicine to make life easier for people like my grandparents and parents.”
The UCREW summer project involved using AI to process images from the world’s smallest hyperspectral microscope. This tool has the potential to influence biomedical research. Researchers could use the hyperspectral microscope to map biomolecules without costly staining methods.
“This was my first time working in a lab,” she says. “I’ve learned that the world has a lot of complex problems, but solutions can start when we take a hands-on approach to understanding the science that can solve them. By collaborating with graduate student Alexander Ingold, I learned how to streamline and train a probabilistic Pix2Pix model for integration with the hyperspectral microscope. I reduced the bit depth of the cGAN Pix2Pix model for faster inference and lower power consumption and learned to develop python code to analyze the angular diffusion profile of an optical filter.”
And Umamageswaran’s work didn’t stop when summer ended. Aadhi continues programming and refining models in Professor Rajesh Menon’s electrical engineering lab, gaining multidisciplinary experience that blends computer science and health innovation.
The summer project also included work involving ECE professors Jamesina Simpson and Morteza Fayazi.
Prof. Jamesina Simpson oversaw a high school student on a project entitled “FDTD Modeling of Electromagnetic Wave Interaction with a Tree” and another student on a project entitled “How to Categorize and Label the Landscape Elements of LIDAR Data.”
Prof. Morteza Fayazi oversaw another West High student on a project entitled “Using PINNs to Model Physical Scenarios.”
Rajesh Menon also assisted a research intern on “Testing a Modal-Decomposition-Based Approach to 3D Light Wave Generation.”
