Grad student wins campus leadership award

Samantha Knoll, a PhD candidate in MechSE professor Taher Saif’s research group, was awarded the inaugural Graduate Student Leadership Award, an honor sponsored by the Graduate College and its student advisory group SAGE (Students Advising Graduate Education). The award recognizes graduate students who have exhibited outstanding service that has positively impacted the campus or wider Urbana-Champaign community. Knoll was one of only two winners of this award campus-wide.

Knoll’s nomination was based on her leadership efforts as an advocate for women and minorities in STEM graduate programs, as well as her efforts as a student entrepreneur and co-founder of AVriculture, an agricultural surveillance company.

Her research focuses on understanding how living cells sense their local mechanical microenvironment. Through a unique hydrogel fabrication technique, she quantifies small-scale, dynamic force interactions between cells and soft materials. Characterizing nanoscale cell force fluctuations could provide insight as to how cells deterministically perform activities such as spreading, differentiation, and migration. Such insight can potentially help characterize other largely unknown phenomena, like the time evolution of disease.

Outside the lab, Knoll has been involved in outreach activities including MechSE’s annual GBAM camp (Girls Building Awesome Machines), part of the College of Engineering G.A.M.E.S. camp series each summer.

“I am extremely grateful to have received this award. The creative, exciting world of research has inspired me to pursue various leadership opportunities as a grad student, and has made the academic journey truly unique so far. I'm thrilled to have been honored, and I think it will continue to serve as a reminder of how much the academic realm has to offer.”

The award will be presented at the Image of Research/Leadership Award reception on April 8.