In an NJIT First, Engineering Student Ayushi Sangoi Wins a Coveted Tau Beta Pi Graduate Fellowship

Ayushi Sangoi ’20, a Ph.D. candidate who uses neuroimaging and eye movement-tracking equipment to discover connections between brain injuries and eye disorders was awarded a highly competitive graduate fellowship from Tau Beta Pi, the national engineering honor society. The biomedical engineer is the first NJIT graduate student to receive one.

Sangoi was among 28 awardees, selected from a field of 336 applicants, who were commended for their academic achievements, campus leadership and service, and anticipated contributions to their fields. Fellows receive a $10,000 stipend.

“It’s wonderful to be recognized for your work and to be set apart with the other named fellows, who are quite extraordinary and inspiring,” commented Sangoi, who was the president of NJIT’s Tau Beta Pi chapter her senior year, Newark College of Engineering’s “Outstanding Senior” and a member of the Albert Dorman Honors College.

“I look forward to networking with other fellowship alumni – to learn about labs where I may want to do a postdoc, for example, and about their experiences in academia and out of it.”

Sangoi is a longtime researcher in biomedical engineering professor Tara Alvarez’s Vision and Neural Engineering Laboratory, whose engineers developed a novel vision therapy device that detects and treats the eye motor disorder known as convergence insufficiency (CI), in which the muscles that control eye movements do not coordinate to focus on near objects. Because each eye sees images separately, the person experiences double and blurred vision, headaches and difficulty concentrating. The impact on cognition and learning can be severe, particularly in children.

Sangoi has recently been measuring how quickly and how much test subjects with CI can adapt as their area of focus changes from nearer to farther, as compared with people with normal vision. An article on the study has been accepted by the peer-reviewed journal Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science, marking her first publication as a first, or principal, author.

The disorder is also one of the primary symptoms of concussion. Alvarez and her team are currently conducting clinical trials at major children’s hospitals around the country, where their partners are testing the device to determine if it can be developed into a powerful diagnostic tool for these brain injuries.

In what she describes as “a pivot to the brain” as a graduate student, Sangoi is also analyzing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scans conducted as test subjects complete eye movements directed by a video screen that flashes visual targets.

“The scans allow us to monitor blood flow in the brain, to see which areas of the brain are activated as people with CI and without it perform these eye tests,” she noted. “Ultimately, we’d like to learn which parts of the brain are connected to the disorder.” She uses these scans, as well as eye-tracking equipment in the lab, to measure improvements in vision after patients perform therapeutic exercises the team designed.

As a senior capstone project, Sangoi and her teammates designed an automated eye movement analysis program called RETINAS to process the blinks, saccades (rapid, jerky motions) and vergent movements (coordinated action by both eyes to focus on near objects) the study participants produce.

“We were looking at sequences of more than 300 eye movements in less than two minutes and that is a lot for a human to analyze,” noted Sangoi, who was a double major in biomedical and computer engineering and coder par excellence. By classifying eye movements as “good, maybe good and bad,” they taught the program to toss out enormous blinks, but to retain legible vergent movements disrupted by smaller blinks that can be removed by their algorithm.

“We needed to speed up the time of data analysis – ultimately, to get it done in minutes instead of days – so that clinicians can share results with patients at the office. Over time, they will quantitatively measure their progress,” Alvarez said of Sangoi’s work, adding, “Ayushi has an incredible gift for coding, an understanding of science and clinical medicine and the ability to work on a team.”

For her part, Sangoi said she is thrilled to be part of the Vision and Neural Engineering Laboratory, as Alvarez’s team delves deeper into their study of post-concussion care for young children and adolescents.

“To be able to have input into designing new research is so exciting,” she said.

But Sangoi is not only an engineer, inventor and coder. She’s also a teacher who made her mark on NJIT’s Learning Center. As a senior, she recruited and trained enough people from Tau Beta Pi to allow the Center to offer walk-in appointments for engineering students. When the pandemic shut down the campus, they moved the service online. She is still on the group’s executive board.

She was a teaching assistant last year for BME 210, a course focused on coding, and plans to teach again this fall.

“I love teaching,” she says. “For younger students, the creativity resides in coming up with analogies to explain technical terms and hands-on exercises to practice. In college, the challenge is to not tell them too much, but to prompt them to solve the problem.”