Andrew Bennecke
Team Lead
Andrew is a third-year at UCLA studying Computational Biology and Neuroscience. At the intersection of these two fields lies neurotechnology, so he naturally wanted to see what this novel field would offer. Andrew joined Crux at UCLA in his third year in hopes of meeting other students with similar interests and a passion for neurotech in general. As a member of the BrainBrush team, he aimed to create a way which allows people to express their emotions and understand the emotions of others via art. Therefore, Andrew primarily worked on the software team to build a neural network to recognize emotional states based on an EEG input.
Hanniel Uwadia
Literature Team
Hanniel is a third-year UCLA student studying Neuroscience and Disability Studies. With her passion for both fields of study, she joined CruX UCLA in her freshman year and became the internal affairs coordinator to get more involved in brain technology. As a member of Brain Brush, Hanniel sought to create a model through neurotech that categorized emotions in the brain into an art output. Her goal was to provide an option to understand emotions in a visual manner. She was on the literature/theory team and was responsible for providing neuroscience and neurotech backings to the project as well as coordinating experiments to collect sufficient data.
Nicole Lee Yang
TouchDesigner Team
Nicole is a second year student at UCLA studying Neuroscience. She first developed an interest in neurotechnology through Crux at UCLA, a student organization affiliated with NeurotechX, and ever since she has been exploring the uses of EEG data in real life applications. As a member of the BrainBrush, Nicole participated in the Neuroscience Literature team, helping collect and analyze relevant research in Neuroscience and Neurotech. Additionally, with Emma, she co-developed the TouchDesigner system that produces the output torus based on the user’s emotion.
Manya Bali
Literature Team
Manya is a third year neuroscience major who is excited to be a part of BrainBrush. Following her interest in neurotech, Manya wanted to find organizations at UCLA that would allow her to combine her knowledge of human biology with emerging technologies. Through CruX UCLA, she is proud to be a member and leader of a community that encourages undergraduates to explore fascinating topics like brain-computer interfaces. She enjoys working with her peers in BrainBrush to develop emotional classification and art visualization models through literature reviews, handling EEG headsets, and designing experiments.
Emma Friedenberg
TouchDesigner Team
Emma Friedenberg is a double major in Neuroscience and Computational & Systems Biology (C&S Bio) with a concentration in neurosystems at UCLA. As a digital artist, she was inspired to merge her interests in science, technology, and art in BrainBrush – an emotion classifier and brainwave art program. She worked on the Literature and TouchDesigner teams, designing the visual output for the EEG emotion data. Emma plans on obtaining her masters in C&S Bio before attending medical school, where she will pursue a specialty in neurosurgery and continue research in neurotechnology and brain-computer interfaces.
Jonathan Salman
Software Team Lead
Jonathan is a third year Electrical Engineering major at UCLA. He initially joined the CruX UCLA hardware team as a way to blend his interest in neuroscience with meaningful applications of the material from his engineering classes. His favorite part of the experience was getting to meet and connect with students of various backgrounds bound by a common interest in neurotech. As a member of Brain Brush's software team, Jonathan worked on writing the script to translate EEG input data into emotional axis coordinates using a neural network.
Alexandra Kwon
Software Team
Alexandra is a second-year Electrical Engineering major at UCLA. She is interested in studying the countless parallels between technology and the brain and how they interact. She joined CruX in hopes of learning more about neuroscience while offering a unique perspective coming from an engineering background. She is a part of the BrainBrush software team where she helps program the neural network that makes the crucial emotional classifications in the BrainBrush project.