Mike and Renée Child Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Afshan Qamar is a Ph.D. student in energy systems at UC Davis, developing advanced control strategies for grid-interactive buildings to improve energy efficiency. Her work focuses on automating and optimizing building loads to integrate renewable energy and reduce costs and emissions.

Vardhan Peddamallu is a Ph.D. candidate in chemical engineering at UC Davis, where he studies virus–host protein interactions in Dr. Priya Shah’s lab. His research focuses on disrupting a critical Zika virus–host interaction to reduce viral replication and disease pathogenesis.

Tanoogna Mallarapu is a Ph.D. student in civil and environmental engineering at UC Davis, working in the Pavement Research Center. Her research focuses on sustainable pavement materials, with a particular emphasis on rubberized asphalt, benchmarking asphalt and concrete mixes, and conducting life-cycle assessments of transportation infrastructure.

Subhaditya Mitra is a graduate student researcher focused on robotics, automation, and digital twin development for construction vehicles. He enjoys merging structural engineering with advanced manufacturing, robotics, and automation to push the boundaries of innovation in engineering.

Saba Kolahchian is a Ph.D. student in communications at UC Davis and manages the Virtual Interaction and Communication Technology Lab under Dr. Jorge Peña. Her research explores emotion regulation in video games, media–fan feedback loops, and design elements that create specific emotional outcomes.

Prashant Khatiwada is a Ph.D. student in biomedical engineering at UC Davis, where he investigates strategies for peripheral nerve regeneration with potential translational applications. His research interests include cellular and tissue engineering, neural engineering, and biomedical device development.

Pelin Yüksel is a Ph.D. candidate in horticulture and agronomy at UC Davis. Her research focuses on developing lettuce that is resistant to downy mildew, a disease causing major economic losses. Her work reduces chemical use and yield losses and shortens breeding by years.

Parastoo Farajpoor is a Ph.D. candidate in biological systems engineering at UC Davis, conducting research in the Digital Agriculture Lab. Her work applies machine learning and remote sensing to estimate nutrient status in California grapevines, supporting more sustainable vineyard management.

Nafiz Imtiaz Khan is a Ph.D. candidate in computer science at UC Davis, working in the DECAL Lab with Prof. Vladimir Filkov. His research focuses on retrieval-augmented generation and multimodal reasoning. He leads the development of OSSPREY, a forecasting platform for open-source software, and has created widely used tools such as ReACT-GPT and EvidenceBot

Megan Chinn is a Ph.D. students and researcher in Dr. Justin Siegel’s lab, where she leads a project focused on the biosynthesis of rare sugars through enzyme engineering.