Khong, Coyne Named UAB’s Engineering Students of the Year at Annual ECOB Banquet
On Tuesday, February 18, senior biomedical engineering student Georgianna Khong was named the School of Engineering’s Undergraduate Student of the Year, and Caila Coyne, a neuroengineering Ph.D. student, was named Graduate Student of the Year. The two were recognized, along with 15 other UAB student nominees, at the 66th Annual Awards Banquet of the Engineering Council of Birmingham (ECOB).
Other nominees included:
Undergraduates
- Devin Jamar Manigault, Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering
- Jonathan Myers, Electrical & Computer Engineering
- Ashvi Patel, Engineering Design
- Aliandra Clark, Materials Science & Engineering
- Karim Haddad, Mechanical Engineering
Graduate Students
- Bijay Guragain, Biomedical Engineering
- Goodnews Amieghemen, Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering
- Blake Wingard, Electrical & Computer Engineering
- Chandrima Karthik, Materials Science & Engineering
- Desmond Maximillian Flanagan, Mechanical Engineering
- Madeline Demo, MEng, Advanced Safety Engineering and Management
- Travis Krimmel, MEng, Construction Engineering Management
- Steve Wilson, MEng, Structural Engineering
- Teersa Joy Kramer, MEng, Sustainable Smart Cities
Khong is a recipient of multiple scholarships, including the Dr. Jack Lemons Endowed Biomedical Engineering Scholarship, the Dr. Francis J Dupuis Engineering Scholarship, and the Tau Beta Pi Scholarship. She has been named to the President’s List every semester at UAB (2021-present), and has received several other awards, including Outstanding Performance in Biochemistry (2024) and Excellence in Organic Chemistry (2023). She is expected to graduate this spring with high distinguished honors.
At UAB, Khong has worked in the lab of Dr. Palaniappan Sethu, where she assisted with development of microphysiological systems to model the effect of varied factors on cardiac cells in vitro. For her master’s thesis, she designed a cell-based study on autophagy utilizing engineering tissue chip methods. In addition, she completed an internship at Evonik in 2024 and participated in a UAB BME Summer Innovation Fellowship in 2023.
Khong has worked extensively as a peer tutor and teaching assistant in biomedical engineering and chemistry. Outside of academics, she has served as President of the UAB Ambassador Program, associate justice in the Undergraduate Student Government Association, Student Affairs Advisory Board member, UAB Wind Symphony, treasurer of the Vietnamese Student Association, and mentor for Blazers@BHM.
Coyne is the recipient of multiple scholarships, including a Blazer Graduate Research Fellowship, among others.
Coyne currently works in Dr. Rachel Smith's Neural Signals Processing and Modeling Lab, where she uses computational models to capture brain network dynamics from intracranial EEG signals to help localize the seizure onset zone in patients with drug-resistant epilepsy.
She presented her research at multiple conferences during 2024 and has co-authored articles on the subject.
Coyne worked as a mentor during her undergraduate studies at Michigan, and she has continued that at UAB, providing feedback and editing help to undergraduates who work in Smith’s lab.
Coyne has served as the vice president and treasurer of the Neuroengineering Society. She is also a member of the Neuroengineering Curriculum Committee, the NeuroGateways Planning Committee, and is a mentor with the Neuroengineering Mentorship program.
Since May 2023, Coyne has been an Innovate Fellow for the Harbert Institute. Her work as an Innovate Fellow involves performing market, prior art, and patent analyses to help assess the commercial merit of new inventions at UAB and help identify competition and potential industry partners.