2022 Celebration of Excellence | Computer Science
Joaquin is a freshman in the CS program. Currently, she is interested in pursuing research in programming applications in the veterinary medical field. After she finishes her Bachelor’s degree, she plans to write programs and design software as part of a medical research team.
Aaron is a third year undergraduate student studying Computer Science. On campus, he has helped teach software design, mentored first year engineers, and helped lead Design for America. He has previously interned for CSG and Arity in the past, and is excited to be working for Flexport in summer 2022.
Drshika is a sophomore in Computer Science and a member of the Hoeft T&M Program. She is a course assistant for CS225 and has been the corporate chair for ACM@UIUC this past year. She will be interning with Microsoft Research this summer.
Felipe Assumpcao is a rising sophomore studying Computer Science. He is a member of Latinos in Computer Science, as well as a research assistant at the Computer Vision and Robotics Laboratory. Felipe will be interning at Node Chronicles in Summer 2021, where he will be working with Blockchain Technology.
Tim is a senior studying mathematics and computer science. He is a member of the Laboratory for Parallel Numerical Algorithms, where he is investigating parallel/distributed graph algorithms with Professor Solomonik. After graduation, Tim will join Aviatrix as a software engineer.
Nishant is a junior at Illinois pursuing a dual degree in Computer Science and Statistics. He is a course assistant for MATH 257, involved in research with the C3SR-URAI program, and will be interning at Meta Summer 2022.
Emmanuel is in his first year of our BS degree program. At Illinois, he has been a course assistant for CS 124. He will be the Technical Team Chair of the National Society of Black Engineers, and an intern for Motorola Solutions.
Vasu is a junior in Computer Science. At Illinois, she is involved in Hack4Impact as the Tech Director and in the Society of Women Engineers as a co-chair within Community Service. Currently, she is working in motion planning research under Prof. Amato.
Tony is a sophomore double majoring in Computer Science and Statistics. He is a past recipient of the department’s “Yunni and Maxine Pao Memorial Scholarship”, and he has contributed to an open-source “Operation Code”, and will be a software engineer intern at Meta/Facebook this summer 2022.
Ananya is a 2021 Computer Science graduate and current software engineer at Microsoft. She is passionate about mental health advocacy, especially in STEM, and helped create the UIUC Faculty Mental Health Ambassador Program. She has previously been awarded the Fiddler Innovation Prize for her mental health crisis app, Anemone, and has served as a mental health advocate for Mental Health America, Google, and the Federal Government. She also gave a TEDxUIUC talk about her own journey as a college student with mental health.
Libby is a James Scholar first year student in Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana- Champaign. She is the Roundtable President of the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE), where she focuses on bringing together Latinx students in STEM. As a member of the Cancer Scholars cohort, she is learning how to apply computer science to cancer research.
Harsh Deep is a senior in Stat & CS who has dedicated their time here towards helping people. He helped teaching in some form for every semester and summer at UIUC with early sequence classes like CS 125, CS 199: IKP, CS: 199 EMP, CS 225, and CS 277. In addition to office hours, he helped improve their curriculum, written material, held multiple teaching sessions, led and trained newer CAs in 125, provided ideas around course infrastructure and spent long amounts of time finding various bug and security fixes. He also started and ran almost all international office hours during COVID-19.
Xiuhao is a rising senior. At Illinois, he has been a researcher in Forward Data Lab and was a player in Illinois Esports Rainbow Six Siege team.
Rose is in the MS portion of the CS BS/MS joint degree program. She is currently a TA for CS357 and has been an intern at Microsoft.
Yassine is a Freshman in the CS Bachelor’s program. He has worked on projects to help his community, with his most prized project being a classroom management app for his local Sunday school teachers in Seattle.
Foziea is a former US Youth Ambassador to Brazil, CEO and co-founder of T2 Talent, and an undergraduate studying Computer Science at UIUC. In summer 2021, she built an AI algorithm predicting gestational diabetes, and has also built several apps and websites. She is passionate about using technology to improve society, having given a TEDx talk on bias in AI algorithms, serving as founder and President of Effective Altruism at UIUC, and currently interning as a researcher at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications doing work on the implementation of a STEM education program in underrepresented communities state and nationwide.
Jareth is a junior in Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is one of the lead course assistants for CS 233: Computer Architecture. His interests are in cybersecurity and distributed networking.
Zhuofan is a junior pursuing a dual degree in Computer Science and Mathematics and is a James Scholar. At UIUC, she has been a course associate for CS 125 and is a research scholar at Discovery Partners Institute. She is interested in exploring the field of AI and ML.
Pengyue is currently at his 6th semester of his Computer Science + Philosophy Program. He is ready to meet and get to know new friends. He has been a course assitant for CS125, CS241, and is one for CS126. He also won a third place for the mineopoly competition.
Chris is a senior in the BS/MCS joint degree program. He is currently a course assistant for CS 128, and in Summer 2021, he interned at Optiver in Chicago.
Charles is a freshman majoring in Computer Science. He is a recipient of the Channing Brown Scholarship and the Legacy Scholarship. He has done a wide variety of volunteer work, from mentoring children in S.T.E.M related topics, helping the elderly with modern technology, to community work.
Zhengyao is a 4th-year undergraduate student majoring Math & CS. He is excited about how mathematical formalisms can help us improve software quality. His work in formal methods has been published at top conferences such as ASPLOS and CAV.
Cristian Ortiz is a second-year James Scholar undergraduate student in CS. He is currently a member organization such as the Chicago Engineer Foundation, iCause, the Ecuadorian Student Association. With his interest in cybersecurity, he hopes to help improve the security industries in developing Latin American countries and continue to empower the undocumented and Hispanic communities in STEM.
Nathan is a James Scholar at Grainger studying Computer Science. His interests are medicine and full-stack development. He developed the new CS 128 course with Dr. Nowak and serves as a senior staff member for the course.
Gauri is a first-year undergraduate student studying Computer Science. She was part of a research team developing a new encryption algorithm for data at rest. This semester, she is working with the LLVM research group on parallelizing the C++ program.
Hao is a freshman pursuing a BS degree program in Computer Science and Linguistics. At Illinois, he is a undergraduate researcher in the Caesar Group and an analyst for 0to1 Consulting. His interests include natural language processing and extended reality.
Allison is a senior majoring in Computer Science. She is Vice President of the Rube Goldberg Society and an active member of Uniting Pride. She is currently working as a data analytics intern at Caterpillar.
Haley is a first year undergraduate student. Previously, she co-founded and managed a Python Club during her senior year of high school. She is active in the service community through APO. She hopes to become a part of Hack4Impact in Fall 2022.
Adarsh is a third year undergraduate in Mathematics and Computer Science. At Illinois, he is a Lead Course Assistant for CS 128. Currently, he is a SWE Intern at Google Cloud and will be a SWE Intern at IMC Trading this Summer.
Ishani is a freshman in Computer Science as well as a James Scholar. She is a project manager for CS196. She was also a project manager and developer for Women in Computer Science and the Graphic Design Chair for the Society of Women Engineers.
Diego is a rising sophomore from Puerto Rico studying Computer Science. He is a James Scholar, a member of ACM’s SIGpwny, and serves as a Course Assistant for CS124.
During his undergraduate studies, Jason has twice served as a course assistant. For CS 126, Jason established a mentorship program for new code moderators to ensure consistent, high-quality grading and feedback. For CS 374, he spearheaded an effort to incorporate autograded PrairieLearn assignments into the course in order to provide students with quicker feedback and better scaffolding. Currently, Jason is completing senior thesis about CS Education (advised by Professor Craig Zilles). After graduating this May, Jason will begin working at Duolingo, where he hopes to continue contributing to the field of CS Education.
Patrick is a sophomore who is interested in machine learning and its applications, such as bioinformatics, computer vision, as well as software development and automation. He is currently working on two research projects, one of which is on understanding the gap in performance between meta-learning and traditional machine learning through a series of synthetic datasets, and another on using various computer vision and machine learning methods to detect pancreatic cancer in both imaging as well as genomic data.
Lou is a junior in Computer Science. At UIUC, she worked as a course assistant for CS 125 for three semesters until switching to CS 374 in fall 2021.
Tianyun is a junior in Computer Science and Economics. She is involved in the student organization Women in CyberSecurity and the ARCANA research group on computer memory architecture. Previously, she served as a course assistant for Introduction to Computer Science (CS 125) and project manager for Freshman Honors course CS 196.