Aastha Shah is a first-year PhD student at the conformable decoders and has been selected as a recipient of the MIT Presidential Fellowship. MIT established a prestigious program of Presidential Fellowships in 1999 in order to recruit the most outstanding students worldwide to pursue graduate studies at the Institute. Since then, the program has grown to support over 120 new graduate students annually as Presidential Fellows. 

Aastha was also 2021-22 Graduate Fellow of the K. Lisa Yang Bionics Research Centre. Her research focused on the development of flexible interfaces for the application of ultrasound-based health interventions to human tissue. Most recently, she developed a soft sonophoresis patch for the transdermal delivery of niacinamide to the dermis. The support of the Presidential Fellowship will allow her to expand the scope of her research on miniaturized acoustic transducers to unconventional applications in the area of connected health and environmental sensing.