BYU grad wins $320K scholarship to Columbia

PROVO — Unlike many of her Brigham Young University graduating peers, Steffanie Kuehn knows exactly where she'll be and what she'll be doing for the next five years, having parlayed an Internet search and online inquiry into a five-year, $320,000 post-graduate scholarship to Columbia University.

The 21-year-old's full-ride scholarship — good through a doctorate degree in biomedical engineering at Columbia's Laboratory for Intelligent Imaging and Neural Computing — will have her working on developing bionic limbs designed to interact with an amputee's brain.

All this on a BYU undergraduate degree in electrical engineering and Kuehn's admitted limited scholarship in biological and medical fields — and a far cry from her "dream job" as a National Geographic photographer.

"But it's something I want to do — and I'm going to do it," Kuehn said of biomedical engineering, drawing on her successful engineering, science and mathematics backgrounds.

OK, it takes more than mere Web surfing and e-mail to earn such a prestigious postgraduate honor — Kuehn also brings outstanding performances in BYU senior projects and internships and stellar grades sustained after arriving in Provo from Gilbert, Ariz., with a perfect 1600 SAT score and a 4.0 GPA.

Also in her favor in making a jump to biomedical engineering is that she'll be studying and working under laboratory director Paul Sajda, whose own undergraduate degree was in electrical engineering.

"I was impressed with the breadth and depth of Steffanie's research projects at BYU," Sajda said. "She has an excellent background in hands-on, cutting-edge engineering. It is very impressive, considering she's just an undergrad."

Her work will involve the development of prosthetic limbs that, connected to brain activity, will move or act like natural limbs as well as the modifying of spinal cords to help paralyzed patients receive brain signals and forward them to immobilized body parts. Most current research is being done with animals rather than humans.

The opportunity already has become a personal passion that provides "creativity with impact," she said, adding "the brain is the fascinating part of the body."

At BYU, her senior project was to create a quadrotor aerial vehicle used in tracking a moving target; she wrote her own software, allowing her team's small computer processor to reach its full efficiency. And her internship with NASA's Robotics Group involved working on the vision system for future planetary rovers.

Of her four top post-graduate options, Harvard and UC Berkeley wanted her to remain in electrical engineering disciplines, while Columbia and UCLA offered brain-related pursuits.