Hard Work Energizes Year of Achievement
The mood was electric on April 20, as the College of Computing hosted its 35th Annual Awards Celebration. While individual success was on full display, the banquet also honored the community and perseverance that truly power achievement.
“From my seat, I can feel the energy. I see the momentum. We're all about growth and change,” said VivekSarkar, dean and John P. Imlay Jr. Chair of the College of Computing.
“But those are just words. What's really behind the words is all the hard work put in by all of you.Today's celebration is for the entire College, all of you, and all your hard work.”
Students, faculty, and staff from the School of Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) were among those recognized at the celebration. Their accomplishments reflected a year dedicated to excellence in research, teaching, and service. School of CSE award recipients included:
- Grace Kim, M.S. computer science (CS) student: Donald V. Jackson Fellowship
- Sri Ranganathan Palaniappan, M.S. CS student: Donald V. Jackson Fellowship
- Ethan Yang, M.S. CSE student: Marshall D. Williamson Fellowship
- Alumnus Austin Wright (Ph.D. ML-CSE 2025): Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award
- Arlene Washington-Capers, school administrative officer: 25 Years of Service Acknowledgment
Two lecturers in the School of Computing Instruction with ties to the School of CSE received awards at the celebration.
Max Mahdi Roozbahani received a Dean’s Award, which went to instructors who taught class sizes over 350 students this year. A Class of 2019 CSE alumnus, Roozbahani teaches CSE 6242: Data and Visual Analytics.
Nimisha Roy received the Monica Sweat Outstanding Lecturer in External Engagement Award. She earned her Ph.D. in CSE in 2021.
Professor Polo Chau advises Kim, Palaniappan, and Wright, and recommended them for their awards.
Chau is an associate director of Georgia Tech’s M.S. Analytics program, which won the UPS George D. Smith Prize at the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). The award recognizes excellence in preparing students to become practitioners of operations research and analytics.
For Kim, the Jackson Fellowship was the latest achievement in a year decorated with accolades. She was one of two School of CSE students to receive the National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program award (GRFP). Kim was also selected for a Fulbright U.S. Student Program Research award.
Ph.D. student Abir Haque was CSE’s second NSF GRFP awardee, receiving the grant to advance research in scientific computing. Advised by School of CSE Professor and Associate Chair Edmond Chow, Haque additionally received a Department of Energy (DOE) Computational Science Graduate Fellowship.
Chow was appointed to several leadership roles this year in the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). The organization selected Chow as vice president for programs. SIAM also named him as co-chair of next year’s Conference on Computational Science and Engineering.
NSF presented the CAREER award to two CSE faculty. Assistant Professor Yunan Luo received a grant to build artificial intelligence models to study understudied proteins in biology.
Elizabeth Qian is an assistant professor in the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering with a joint appointment in the School of CSE. Her NSF CAREER award will support research developing machine learning methods that learn from multi-fidelity data.
Researchers from the School of CSE were finalists for the 2025 Gordon Bell Prize. Assistant Professor Spencer Bryngelson led a team that included Ph.D. students Ben Wilfong and Anand Radhakrishnan, Research Staff member Dan Vickers, and alumnus Henry Le Berre (CS 2025).
The team achieved the largest computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation to date, exceeding the current record by a factor of 20. The group simulated interacting plumes of 33 rocket thrusters inspired by the SpaceX Super Heavy booster.
Bryngelson advises Melody Lee, an undergraduate student who was one of three Georgia Tech students to receive a Barry Goldwater Scholarship this year. She received the award to continue research at the intersection of quantum computing and CFD.
Assistant Professor Qi Tang received the DOE Early Career Research Award. He is the first-ever faculty member from CSE and the College of Computing to receive the award.
The $875,000 award will support Tang for five years as he researches particle data processing and compression, with applications in fusion, accelerator, and nuclear physics.
Tang was also selected as a Summer Early Career Scholar of Digital Futures at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden.
Bryngelson and Tang were selected as collaborators for three DOE Predictive Science Academic Alliance Program (PSAAP IV) Centers. The program leverages the academic community to advance science-based modeling and simulation.
One of Tang’s students, Alex de Magalhaes, received a SPARK Award scholarship from the Georgia Tech Strategic Energy Institute. The award recognizes outstanding student engagement in energy research.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) awarded prestigious R01 grants to three CSE faculty, each valued at $1.2 million.
Assistant Professor Anqi Wu is using the grant to study multi-animal social behavior using advanced representation learning and reinforcement learning.
NIH awarded a grant to Assistant Professor Kai Wang and Professor B. Aditya Prakash to build an AI framework to efficiently treat patients diagnosed with diabetes and other chronic diseases.
Prakash advises M.S. student Sudarshan Anand, who claimed two awards at the 2025 International Conference on Biomedical and Health Informatics. First, Anand was the champion of the conference’s data challenge competition. Then, the conference selected him as a Young Professional NextGen Scholar.
Assistant Professor Victor Fung won a 2025 Google Scholar Program award. He received the award in the Applied Science category for multi-modal scientific agents for in silico materials discovery and inverse design. The Research Scholar Program provided up to $60,000 to early-career professors to support advancement of their research.
This year, the College of Computing selected School of CSE Professor Rich Vuduc as director of Georgia Tech’s Center for Scientific Software Engineering (CSSE). The center was formed in 2022 from an $11 million investment from Schmidt Sciences. Georgia Tech was one of four universities that Schmidt Sciences selected to host a center.
CSSE develops custom software tools and best practices to meet scientists' needs. Overall, this approach accelerates the pace and quality of scientific discovery.
Vuduc advised alumnus Elizabeth Hong (CS 2025), who received a Fulbright U.S.-Korea Presidential STEM Initiative Award. Designed to promote academic and cultural exchange, the award provided graduating college seniors and graduate students funding to pursue independent research projects in Korea on STEM topics of their choice.
Vuduc advises Ph.D. student Max Hawkins, who was selected for the OMSCS Pre-Doctoral Fellowship program.
The program provided Hawkins support to design and teach a one-credit, pass/fail/audit seminar course. Hawkins taught Computing at Scale: The Design, Operation, and Societal Impacts of Data Centers in Fall 2025 and a research course in Spring 2026.
Hawkins also received a $3,000 scholarship through the 7X24 Exchange Atlanta Scholarship Program. He was one of three scholarship recipients awarded to students in the greater Atlanta area with research interests in the data center industry.
Vuduc advises Team Phoenix, Georgia Tech’s student cluster competition team. Team Phoenix placed first among USA participants and sixth internationally at SC25’s IndySCC competition (30 total teams, 12 USA and 18 international). The team was graded on optimizing techniques and running industry standard benchmarks on supercomputers.
The team included computer science undergraduate students Alexander Ichtovkin, Alex Kim, Aiden Lambert, Sahil Samar, Seth Yiming Shi, and Venkata Sai Aditya Reddy Devarapalli. Graduate students Charles Lindsey and Jay Saraha mentored the team coached by Research Scientists Jeff Valdez, Aaron Jezghani, and Will Powell.
Alumni Ziyi (Francis) Yin (Ph.D. CSE-CSE 2024), Rafael Orozco (Ph.D. CSE-CSE 2024), Mathias Louboutin (Ph.D. CS-CSE 2020), and Professor Felix Herrmann received an honorable mention for the Best Paper of 2024 from the journal Geophysics. The award, presented in 2025, recognized the group’s work on WISE: a full-waveform variational inference via subsurface extensions.
Georgia Tech approved both of CSE’s promotion cases this year. Elizabeth Cherry will be promoted to full professor. Srijan Kumar will be promoted to associate professor with tenure.
