Five Bioengineering students receive NSF GRFP awards
Five students from the University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering’s Department of Bioengineering are recipients of the National Science Foundation’s prestigious Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) awards this fall.
“This prestigious national fellowship recognizes academic excellence, research potential, and a commitment to science ambassadorship,” said Sanjeev Shroff, Bioengineering Department Chair and Gerald E. McGinnis Chair in and Distinguished Professor of Bioengineering. “Congratulations to the five recipients and their faculty mentors on this exceptional milestone. Tying our department's all-time high for a single academic year is a remarkable achievement that reflects the vibrant, world-class research community we continue to build together.”
This year’s awardees are:
Payton Bechefsky
Bechefsky is a first-year PhD student in Bioengineering, advised by Genis Prat-Ortega in the Rehab and Neural Engineering Labs (RNEL). Her research focuses on invasive and non-invasive spinal stimulation for motor control restoration in individuals with neurodegenerative diseases, with a particular emphasis on improving smoothness of movement for children with cerebral palsy, while also working to understand why motor control breaks down in these conditions. Bechefsky received the fellowship in 2025 while working as a clinical neurotechnology research assistant with the collaborative Braingate team at Emory University.
“My time at Emory allowed me to develop clinical skills working with our paralyzed participant, T16, and strengthen my computational skills working with analyzing spinalized locomotion data with guidance from a postdoc and friend, Lahiru Wimalasena.” Bechefsky said. “This allowed me to discover my passion in the field of neurotechnology and gave me the skills to express this in my research proposal.”
She also traces much of her path to this award back to her time as an undergraduate at UCLA, where she served as a peer advisor, taught a project-focused circuit class, and sat on the board of the campus neurotechnology club. Bechefsky is especially grateful to her letter writers and to her peers at Emory who read and gave feedback on her application, crediting a supportive network of advisors, researchers, and friends for helping her along the way.
“This award has had a huge impact on me, giving me the funding to be a student here at Pitt doing the work I felt most inspired by when I was applying,” Bechefsky said. “I feel encouraged that I am on the right path and belong alongside all the amazing researchers around me. I’m more inspired than ever to continue to give back to the community and to push progress in using spinal stimulation to restore movement in those who lost it from an early age.”
Casey Cargill
Cargill is a second-year PhD student in the Department of Bioengineering, where she specializes in the Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine (TERM) track. Advised by Jonathan Vande Geest in the Soft Tissue Biomechanics Laboratory, Cargill’s research focuses on addressing vision loss caused by conditions such as age-related macular degeneration. Cargill collaborates with vision scientists and clinicians to develop patient-specific, 3D bioengineered models of the eye’s vascular system. By replicating the complex blood vessel networks and fluid dynamics within the eye, her work seeks to better understand how vascular disruptions contribute to blindness and to support the development of more personalized therapeutic strategies. Cargill is also a member of the Graduate Women in Engineering Network, the Black Graduate Student Alliance, and the Graduate Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) chapter.
“My Jamaican heritage instilled in me, ‘Labor for learning before you grow old; for learning is better than silver or gold. Silver and gold will vanish away, but a good education will never decay.’ Cargill said. This fellowship supports my research as well as my personal values, allowing me to keep investing in academic growth and using it to benefit others.”
Addianette Segarra Negrón
Segarra Negrón is a first-year master's student in the MS-to-PhD BRIDGE program, working under the mentorship of Mo Ebrahimkhani in the Synthetic Morphogenetics and Tissue Ecology Lab. Originally from San Juan, Puerto Rico, Segarra Negrón completed her bachelor's degree in biomedical engineering at the Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico. Her research interests sit at the intersection of developmental biology, tissue engineering, synthetic biology, and biological systems engineering, with a focus on understanding how cells dynamically self-organize, communicate, and assemble into tissues and complex structures, and how subtle, localized variations in the microenvironment shape these processes. Through REU experiences working on microphysiological systems and microfluidic platforms, Segarra Negrón became motivated to explore biological self-organization more deeply, recognizing that while these platforms have driven major progress in modeling disease and drug delivery, challenges like vascularization, scalability, and reproducibility remain. Her NSF GRFP proposal centers on designing and fabricating a microphysiological system to model lymphatic vessel function.
“Winning this fellowship validated that I have the potential to pursue graduate school, even without all the resources or help. I am very grateful to my previous institution and all my professors who took the time to write me wonderful letters of recommendation.” Segarra Negrón said. “It also alleviates financial challenges, and while it is hard to leave home and my sisters, who mean everything to me and have always supported me, I’m excited to pursue a career in research, give back to my community in PR, and continue my journey of academic and personal growth.”
Ritesh Shrivastav
Shrivastav is a second-year PhD student in the Department of Bioengineering, on the neural engineering track under the mentorship of Helen Schwerdt. In the Schwerdt lab, his work centers on developing minimally invasive tools to measure dopamine in the human brain with high spatial and temporal resolution.Shrivastav's research aims to elucidate how pathological dopamine fluctuations in the brain manifest as motor dysfunction in Parkinson’s patients. According to Shrivastav, this is essential foundational science for the future development of adaptive treatment technologies that could be personalized to each patient’s unique brain state.
“Post-graduation, I would love to continue to build upon my research by developing treatments for Parkinson’s disease such as using dopamine as a biomarker for adaptive deep brain stimulation." Shrivastav said. "In the long term, I hope to translate this work into a startup focused on bringing these technologies from the lab to the clinic. This fellowship would provide critical support for the validation research that I will conduct during my PhD, laying a foundation for future commercialization and real-world impact.”
Vanshika Singh
Vanshika Singh is a second-year PhD student in the Department of Bioengineering pursuing the neural engineering track. They conduct their research in the B.I.O.N.I.C. Lab under the mentorship of Takashi (TK) Kozai. Singh’s research explores how non-neuronal cells in the brain, specifically microglia, contribute to inflammation and metabolic stress across neurological disease states. Their recent work has focused on how microglial calcium dynamics change in response to electrode-induced injury, and I’m interested in extending this work to explore how these signaling changes manifest in the context of Alzheimer’s disease. Singh is also interested in investigating ultrasound as a neuromodulatory tool, particularly its mechanistic targets and how it may influence microglial activity and calcium signaling.
Beyond the lab, Singh is actively engaged in mentorship and scholarly service, spending the past two summers mentoring high school students through the Hillman Academy and recently as a reviewer for Ingenium, an undergraduate research journal at the Swanson School of Engineering. Singh also presented their research on microglial responses to electrode insertion injury at the Society for Neuroscience Conference 2025.
“It is an incredible honor to be an NSF GRFP Fellow.” Singh said. “The three years of support will give me the freedom to pursue curiosity-driven research and take intellectual risks that might otherwise be difficult. Beyond funding, this fellowship marks a meaningful milestone in my path toward a career in academic research."