Hoi Zäme- Hi everyone!!

Herzlich Wilkommen- Warm Welcome to all the ThinkSwiss scholarship winners and readers of this blog! Congrats on receiving the scholarship! I am very excited for this amazing learning adventure, and would like to thank the Swiss Embassy for this opportunity.



My name is Katie Peige and I just finished my junior year at Arizona State University. I am a sustainability major with a concentration in international development. This summer I will be researching at the Institute of Political Science at University of Zürich from the end of May until the end of July. My topic for the summer is international climate change policy, more specifically,
"US opposition to the Clean Development Mechanism - interest groups and arguments". I will be working with Prof Katharina Michaelowa and Axel Michaelowa. I am very excited because I have been asked to be an observer at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Negotiations in Bonn, Germany for the first two weeks of June. Last summer, I interned at Maryland Department of the Environment where I worked with climate change policy at the state level and so I am very excited to learn more about international climate change policy especially before the Climate Change Negotiations that will be held in Copenhagen at the end of this year.



I am ecstatic to return to Switzerland after previously studying in Thurgau as an exchange student my junior year of high school. I can not wait to brush up on my Swiss and High German and reconnect with my host family and friends.


See you soon in Switzerland!



Bis Bald!



~Katie aka Käterli

Congratulations to all

Dear all,

First of all, a big congratulation on winning the 2009 ThinkSwiss Research Scholarships! I'm sure all of us can't wait to embark on a journey to Switzerland, this coming summer.

My name is Yee Hoong Chow, a junior in chemical & biological engineering at Northwestern University. My current research interests focus on energy-related topics, and am now working in the lab of Professor Linda Broadbelt at Northwestern, the the field of molecular simulation. Previously, I worked in tissue engineering and cell culture, under Professor Lonnie Shea on his ovarian follicle culture and maturation project, between 2006 and 2007. My research activities have had a strong connection to biological systems and application of chemical engineering.

This summer, I will be researching with Professor Vassily Hatzimanikatis, in the Laboratory of Computational Systems Biotechnology at EPFL. I do know German - but not French - so going to the French speaking part of Switzerland shall be a different kind of experience to me.

All in all I'm simply excited about this summer, as well as the opportunity to meet up with you all. Looking forward to a great summer in Switzerland.

-Yee Hoong
Northwestern University

Introductions

Hello to my fellow researchers and to our web readership at large. My name is Erin Turk, and I am entering my final year of undergraduate studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. I'm a biology major and an incurable lab rat. This summer (June 1 - July 31) I will be headed to the Université de Lausanne on beautiful Lake Geneva to study in Professor Jürg Tschopp's lab. I will be working with a post-doc on the UV-induced DNA damage response. I have worked in a couple of different cancer labs, and am excited to tackle the problem from a new angle as a part of a biochemistry lab. So far, I've enjoyed meeting parts of the lab by email and can't wait to see them all in person.

I spent last summer in the MIT Summer Research Program in the Jacks Lab with a fantastic Swiss post-doc, Etienne Meylan. He often told me of the wonderful environment in Lausanne and Switzerland in general, and piqued my interest in working there. Having never been to Switzerland, I am very excited to go, meet new people, and learn a new language. I am a native San Diegan, so the French is very new. I'm hoping I will not arrive and attempt to speak French in a Spanish accent, as would befit my regional background, but we shall see soon enough.

I am very grateful to the ThinkSwiss Research Scholarship for the funding and the forum in which to share a collection of new experiences. So for now, À bientôt tout le monde!

The beginning

Dear All,

Above all, congratulations to the 2009 ThinkSwiss Scholarship recipients! Also, a big thanks to Mr. Lukas Sieber who has been very supportive to us in the application process!

My name is Jason Qian. I am a 2nd year undergraduate student studying biomedical engineering at the George Washington University in Washington D.C.

Around June 1st, I will be heading to Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) to work in the laboratory headed by Dr. Melody Swartz of the Institute of Bioengineering. Dr. Swartz's lab is focused on understanding the fundamental mechanism of lymphatic system. For example, how nano-scale particles can enhance drug-delivery to lymphatic metastasis.

I grew up in French town across the border from Geneva named St. Genis Pouilly (near CERN). Among the many activities I love to do are bike riding, mountain hiking, photography, traveling. I hope I can use my acquaintance with the area to organize various outdoor activities with the others recipients.

I am very very very excited to go back to Switzerland for this summer not only to acquire new research experience and meet the other ThinkSwiss scholars, but also to catchup with family and friends (and the culinary delights!).

Let the fun begin!

See y'all

Congartulations to all the recipients of Thinkswiss2009 scholarship

Hi,
This is Ishita Basu from the University of Illinois at Chicago. I am a phd student here in the electrical and computer engineering department. My research interest is biomedical signal processing and modeling of neurological data. I would be visiting the biomedical image processing lab in EPFL headed by Prof. Michael Unser. I will be working with Dr Dimitri Van De Ville who is heading the Signal Processing Unit of the Centre d'Imagerie BioMédicale (CIBM) at the University Hospital of Geneva (HUG). He is also a senior member of the Biomedical Imaging group at EPFL.
I am pretty excited about this opportunity and I hope to learn newer techniques that I can use on the data I am interested in. This would also be my first visit to Europe.

Ishita

The 2009 ThinkSwiss Researchers

Dear 2009 ThinkSwiss Researchers,

Congratulations on being selected for a 2009 ThinkSwiss Research Scholarship! This Blog is a place for you to share your experiences and for us to provide you with helpful information and let you know about meetings and events. Please keep in touch and be sure to write on the ThinkSwiss Research Blog on a regular basis!

Please introduce yourself briefly and tell us about your expectations and your research project in Switzerland.

The whole ThinkSwiss community is very interested in your research experiences and will read with great curiosity your posted blogs. The exchange of knowledge and the establishment of a network between you and Swiss researchers in your labs is one of the main objectives of the ThinkSwiss research stay.
The following students were awarded and do research at the following Swiss universities/research institutes:

Brett Albert (Harvard University), ETH Zurich

Erin Turk (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute), University of Lausanne

Igor Labutov (City University of New York), EPFL

Ishita Basu (University of Illinois at Chicago), EPFL

Jason Qian (George Washington University), EPFL

Jialiang (Julian) Wang (Department of Architecture, Texas A&M University), EPFL

Jonathan Broogard (Northwestern University), University of Lausanne

Kalin Peige (Arizona State University), University of Zurich

Kayla King (Indiana University), EAWAG

Martin Monasteiro (Rutgers University), ETH Zurich

Matan Mayer (Harvard University), EPFL

Nicole Beckage (Indiana University), University of Basel

Rebecca Recker (Johns Hopkins University), University of Geneva

Rob Futia (Loyola College in Baltimore), University of Zurich

Savannah Adams (Emory University Atlanta), ETH Zurich

Tom Stewart (Columbia University), ETH Zurich

Yee Hoong Chow (Northwestern University), EPFL

We are looking forward to reading more about your research and your time in Switzerland.

Kind regards,

Lukas (on behalf of the program committee)