ECE PhD Student Sydney Overton Receives Ann G. Wylie Dissertation Fellowship

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ECE Ph.D. Student Sydney Overton has been named the recipient of a 2026-2027 Ann G. Wylie Dissertation Fellowship. Sponsored by the UMD Graduate School, the fellowship provides financial support to UMD doctoral candidates who are in the latter stages of writing their dissertations.

Overton earned bachelor’s degrees in electrical engineering and physics from Virginia Tech. She joined ECE in 2022 and is currently a member of the MEMS Sensors and Actuators Lab (MSAL), where she works on creating ingestible capsules, miniaturized biomedical devices that can diagnose and address gastrointestinal (GI) tract issues.

As an advocate for student life, she has devoted time to enhancing the graduate student experience on campus. She is the former president of the ECE Graduate Student Association (ECE GSA), has been a graduate student representative on the A. James Clark School of Engineering Senate and Vice President of Financial Affairs for UMD’s Graduate Student Government. She was awarded the ECE David Bader Graduate Student Service Award in 2025.

She has been highly recognized for her work as a graduate teaching assistant and graduate research assistant, including an Outstanding Graduate Assistant Award in 2024, the 2023 George Corcoran Memorial Award for a Graduate Student, a 2024 and a 2026 ECE Outstanding Teaching Assistant Training & Development Award, and a 2023 ECE Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award.

Other awards, acknowledging her exceptional research, include a 2024 Clark Doctoral Fellows Mid-Career Award, a Future Faculty Fellowship from the Clark School, and a UMD Center of Excellence in Microbiome Sciences Summer Research Fellowship. She was recently awarded an ECE Distinguished Dissertation Fellowship for her dissertation titled An Ingestible Capsule for Gastrointestinal Serotonin Sensing to Investigate the Gut-Brain Axis.

In May 2026, Overton was chosen to represent the UMD Clark School of Engineering at WiscProf Future Faculty in Engineering Workshop sponsored by the University of Wisconsin-Madison College of Engineering. She was one of only 30 graduate students and postdoctoral students selected from institutions across the country. WiscProf is a prestigious four-day program designed to prepare participants for careers in academia.

Overton is advised by Distinguished University Professor Reza Ghodssi.

Published May 22, 2026