SLAS Announces $100,000 Graduate Education Fellowship Grant Awarded to Vasu Rao of the University of Michigan

Oak Brook, IL (April 4, 2025) – The Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening (SLAS) is pleased to announce Vasumitra “Vasu” Rao, M.S., Ph.D. candidate in the Biomedical Engineering program at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA), as the 2025 SLAS Graduate Education Fellowship Grant recipient.

Rao’s innovative work at the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI), laboratory automation and microbiology exemplifies SLAS’s mission to support emerging leaders in quantitative biosciences through the grant.

The awarded funding will enable Rao to continue his research under advisor Paul Jensen, Ph.D. (Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering) in the Jensen Lab. Rao’s research, titled “Multimodal Characterization of Microbial Dynamics using Artificial Intelligence,” addresses critical gaps in understanding non-model bacteria like Streptococcus mutans, a key contributor to dental cavities. His project leverages neural ordinary differential equations (Neural ODEs) and generative adversarial networks to predict microbial growth and biofilm architecture under varying conditions—advancements with potential applications in drug discovery, microbiome engineering and beyond.

While Rao is in the early stages of the Ph.D. program, his goals are ambitious: to gain greater expertise in automated science and systems microbiology, to improve his skills as a communicator of science and to understand best how his work aligns with the greater scientific community in both industry and academia.

“Winning this award also gives me confidence to set and achieve goals for myself in my career” says Rao. “I am sure that getting more involved and having conversations with members of the SLAS community will give me great ideas on how to tackle these challenges.”

About the SLAS Graduate Education Fellowship Grant

Judging criteria for the SLAS Graduate Education Fellowship Grant is based on the applicability of the student researcher’s work to laboratory automation and screening, originality and creativity of the scientific approach, quality of the science, presentation of the research objectives, and the quality and capability of the institution and its educational program to support the grant.

The SLAS Fellowship Grant Program was introduced in 2015 to facilitate educational opportunities for outstanding students pursuing graduate degrees related to quantitative biosciences and/or life sciences R&D. This program helps to realize a fundamental tenet of SLAS’s mission: to advance the fields of laboratory science and technology by nurturing the next generation of professional scientists.

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SLAS (Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening) is an international professional society of academic, industry and government life sciences researchers and the developers and providers of laboratory automation technology. The SLAS mission is to bring together researchers in academia, industry and government to advance life sciences discovery and technology via education, knowledge exchange and global community building.

SLAS publishes two peer-reviewed and MEDLINE-indexed scientific journals, SLAS Discovery and SLAS Technology. For more information about SLAS and its journals, visit www.slas.org/journals.

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