Graduate students win awards during 2025-2026 school year

Several graduate students in the Richard and Loan Hill Department of Biomedical Engineering received research awards during the 2025-26 school year to support their work.

In the fall, PhD student Amal Yaghmour received the W.C. and May Preble Deiss Fund for Biomedical Research Award, which funds research in clinical or basic medical science.

Yaghmour works in UIC Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences Searls-Schenk Professor Ali Djalilian’s lab and previously worked in former BME Associate Professor Jae-Won Shin’s lab.

In the spring, PhD students Brandon Lukas and Seyed Mohsen Ranjbaran and master’s student Maddalena Arrighi received the UIC Graduate College Award for Graduate Research.

Lukas works in Professor Yang Dai’s lab, while Ranjbaran works in BME Professor Kamran Avanaki’s lab. Arrighi is a dual-degree master’s student with UIC and the Politecnico di Milano and works in Richard and Loan Hill Professor Ian Papautsky’s lab.

The Award for Graduate Research is the UIC Graduate College’s longest-running support for research by graduate students, the award funds three categories: research travel, summer research stipend, and materials/supplies.

Dai is also the interim director of the UIC Center for Bioinformatics and Quantitative Biology.