About
Hi, I'm Elizabeth! I'm a fourth-year PhD student in electrical engineering at Stanford University. I research how we can use radar remote sensing to understand more about processes on Earth. I work mainly on InSAR (interferometric synthetic aperture radar), which looks at how radar phase changes from one image to another to tell us how Earth is changing. I’m particularly interested in measuring how vegetation and soil moisture change in dynamic environments, like agricultural areas and permafrost regions. My favorite types of problems involve modeling how electromagnetic waves interact with their environment, and then combining those models with real-world data to learn more about the environment by analyzing the waves that pass through it. I'm also active in Stanford's Women in Electrical Engineering club, and served as president in the 2021-22 and 2022-23 school years.
I graduated from Northeastern University in 2020 with a dual Bachelor's/Master's degree in electrical engineering. I am passionate about electromagnetics and space, and have worked at Draper Laboratory, Northeastern's ALERT Center for research on explosives detection, and NASA. I was also the president of Northeastern's IEEE Student Chapter.
NASA Jet Propulsion Lab
Electrical Engineering Intern, Jun-Aug 2018
During my internship at the Jet Propulsion Lab, I worked in the Radar Concepts and Formulations group. I did research into the possibility of using nuclear magnetic resonance at a low frequency and low field to detect groundwater on other planetary bodies. My lab work consisted of design and testing on the prototype NMR system, including integration of a lock-in amplifier, impedance matching and switching circuitry, MATLAB, and various other filtering and amplification equipment in search of the very weak signal.
NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center
Electrical Engineering Intern, Jan-May 2018
During my internship at NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center, I worked to integrate ADS-B (Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast) onto an F-18 supersonic aircraft. ADS-B is a surveillance method for aircraft that provides accurate tracking of airplanes. The aircraft receive their positions from a GPS, and broadcast their location information to other airplanes and ground stations. NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center is working toward implementation of ADS-B on supersonic aircraft as a safer alternative to radar. I developed the electrical design to install the pre-production ADS-B prototype on an F-18, and planned and executed test procedures to verify the design in the lab, in a van, and on the ground, as well as in the air. This prototypical supersonic ADS-B system will pave the way for commercial supersonic flights and better-tracked spaceflight.
Northeastern ALERT Center
Undergraduate Researcher, July 2016-present
In my work at ALERT, I have been developing mathematical models for airport security scanners. Using principles from electromagnetics, including ray tracing and the method of images, I have developed mathematical models for dielectric (insulating) objects against the human body: in essence showing what the signal that the scanner receives should look like for a given object. I then compared these models with actual data from a Smiths mm-wave scanner to improve their accuracy. The goal is better characterization of all objects detected by security scanners, to quickly filter out genuine threats from benign objects, for a faster and safer security experience. One paper on my work was published at the European Conference on Antennas and Propagation 2017; two more papers, one that I wrote and one that I contributed to, will be published at the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society conference in July 2018.