Khoury News

Khoury students bring in record awards haul at 2026 Northeastern convocation

From co-ops and community building to research and service, Khoury students have paved distinctly impactful paths during their time at Northeastern. Last month, the university recognized them for it.

by Benjamin Hosking and Milton Posner

Last April, Khoury students earned a college-record 40 honors at Northeastern’s annual Academic Honors Convocation. This April, not content with that tally, they surpassed themselves, with 50 students earning distinction at the April 16 event.

To meet some of the winners, click any of the linked names below, or simply read on.

Fulbright semifinalist

Hodgkinson Award

Condit Award

Critical Language Scholarship

Schwarzman Scholarship

Benjamin A. Gilman Scholarship

Outstanding PhD Student Award in Humanics

Outstanding PhD Student Award in Research

Outstanding PhD Student Award in Teaching

Outstanding Global Network Student Award

Huntington 100

Laurel and Scroll 100

Anika Jaswal, Fulbright Semifinalist

For Anika Jaswal, a passion for data science and immunology led to a deeper focus on understanding T-cell biology, immune regulation, and tumor microenvironments. As a CaNCURE trainee at a Harvard Medical School laboratory, an oncology summer intern at Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine, and a co-op at Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Jaswal leveraged computational tools to advance immunology research.

Alexis Musaelyan, Fulbright Semifinalist

Driven by the challenge of building AI systems that are technically rigorous, equitable, and safe, Alexis Musaelyan applied her data science skills to domains like health care and national security through research in machine learning, AI-driven threat detection, and bioinformatics for Harvard Medical School, Microsoft, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Naval Research Laboratory. She also founded Threshold — a neurotechnology venture developing adaptive AI for nervous system regulation, — and earned both a Women Who Empower Innovator Award and Huntington 100 distinction.

READ: Khoury “Women Who Empower” winners advance cybersecurity, pet care tools

Zack Eisbach, Hodgkinson Award

Zachary Eisbach specializes in programming languages and formal verification, conducting research that ensures programs written in different languages can safely interact without compromising the security guarantees each language offers. While on co-op at Northeastern’s Programming Research Lab, Eisbach laid the groundwork for his time with Apple’s Swift language team, becoming the Swift team’s first-ever research intern. Outside of his research, he served as president of the Northeastern Math Club.

Now graduated, Eisbach is a software engineer at Jane Street Capital, where he works on the company’s OxCaml compiler.

Hannah Wimpy, Condit Award

Stamps Scholar Hannah Wimpy leveraged her interdisciplinary interests in robotics and biochemistry to build autonomous systems in everything from life science to manufacturing. Through a grant-backed fellowship at Northeastern’s Center for Drug Discovery, co-ops at Lila Sciences and Harvard Medical School, and two ventures of her own design, Wimpy learned to make systems work reliably in complex real-world environments. She also served as executive director for Northeastern’s builder community, rev.

READ: Khoury “Women Who Empower” winner designs her own major and drug discovery software

Anastasia Lindquist, Critical Language Scholarship

Anastasia Lindquist’s studies in computer engineering and computer science were enhanced by her minor in Chinese, leading her to a co-op in the semiconductor industry and a visit to TSMC in Taiwan. She completed Chinese-language Dialogues of Civilizations in Taiwan and China, where she spent her second co-op in the robotics industry. She also participated in Northeastern’s Underwater Robotics Club. This summer, Lindquist is returning to China as part of the Critical Language Scholarship program.

Su Cizem, Schwarzman Scholarship

After studying philosophy at UCLA, Su Cizem moved to London to study AI and ethics at Northeastern. As a Schwarzman Scholar, she will study global affairs at Tsinghua University in China next year.

Cizem has focused on AI governance and the international challenges of managing high-risk technologies while working at The Future Society and the French Center for AI Safety. She co-founded Northeastern University London’s AI and Ethics Society and worked as a research assistant on an international relations and policy project.

Colombe Akpaca, Benjamin A. Gilman Scholarship

Aspiring to leverage data-driven solutions to address health disparities in sickle cell disease, Colombe Akpaca built her academic foundation in discrete structures, algorithms, data structures, and database systems. She contributed to the ITS team while on co-op at Northeastern’s Office of Information Security and is a member of the National Society of Black Engineers, the Legacy Mentoring Program, and Northeastern’s chapter of ColorStack, where she works to empower Black and Latino computing students.

Kayleen Kang, Benjamin A. Gilman Scholarship

Kayleen Kang’s passion for building AI systems that are both technically strong and helpful to diverse users led her to pursue a combined BS/MS degree in computer science. Her interest in AI began during an internship at Giant Step, a global creative tech studio, where she trained Stable Diffusion models aimed at helping WEBTOON digital comic artists.

While exploring distributed systems through a collaborative project in Sydney, Australia, Kang extended database benchmarking tools across MongoDB and Cassandra on AWS. Other projects include building Q-learning agents and constraint solving algorithms, deepening her understanding of search, optimization, and decision making under uncertainty.

Ha Le, Outstanding PhD Student Award in Humanics

Advised by Stephen Intille and Varun Mishra, Ha Le develops human-in-the-loop systems for tracking and measuring physical activity and everyday behaviors using wearable devices. She recently earned Apple’s AI/ML PhD Fellowship and is part of both the mHealth Research Group and the UbiWell Lab.

Chantal Shaib, Outstanding PhD Student Award in Research

Advised by Byron Wallace, Chantal Shaib is a PhD candidate in computer science with a focus on the evaluation of generative large language models. Her research characterizes and measures linguistic diversity in these models and studies the ensuing implications for robustness, accuracy, safety, and societal impact.

READ: AI slop is a common online nuisance. But what makes a piece of text “slop”?

Guangyuan Weng, Outstanding PhD Student Award in Teaching

Guangyuan Weng is a PhD candidate in computer science whose research focuses on machine learning, human–AI interaction, and responsible AI, with an emphasis on building systems that better understand human behavior and support fairer, more reliable decision-making. He is interested in compositional visual reasoning and hopes to draw inspiration from human cognitive abilities to develop more generalizable machine learning models.

Weng’s interests were shaped by research in vision-language models, retrieval-augmented generation, human mobility modeling, and agent-based simulation while working in university labs and industry. He served as a teaching assistant for several computer science courses, deepening his passion for teaching and mentorship.

Anusha Devanga, Outstanding Global Network Student Award (Portland)

Anusha Devanga specializes in immersive technologies for educational impact. Her work includes developing a mixed reality sandbox and collaborating with Northeastern’s outreach program to bring immersive STEM experiences to K–12 classrooms across Maine. She expanded her expertise during a co‑op with the Blue Latitudes Foundation, building virtual reality tools to visualize ocean life around oil rigs.

READ: How the Roux Institute plays matchmaker for its master’s students and incubator startups

Aisha Abdur Rahim, Outstanding Global Network Student Award (Silicon Valley)

Aisha Abdur Rahim’s research interests span full-stack development, AI, and human–computer interaction, with a focus on creating technology that understands human needs and impacts learning, health, and psychological well-being. She works as a research assistant for Khoury Assistant Teaching Professor Akram Bayat and as a teaching assistant for algorithms — experiences which inspired her research interests.

Rahim serves as a Student Services Ambassador and in leadership roles for Huskies Beyond Borders, NU Algorithmic Interactive Gaming, and Innovation Consulting Group.

Kalhar Pandya, Outstanding Global Network Student Award (Vancouver)

Building on a strong foundation in full-stack engineering, Kalhar Pandya designs agentic workflows and hierarchical multi-agent systems to advance AI toward greater autonomy, reliability, and real-world impact. He collaborated with Northeastern faculty on LLM-based root cause analysis for distributed systems, tackling one of modern infrastructure’s most pressing challenges.

As a facilitator for the Vancouver AI Meetup and a TA, Pandya helped build a stronger research and academic community. His team took first place in the campus’s Deloitte AI Hackathon in 2025, and while on co-op at Oracle, he helped design secure authentication systems for enterprise clients.

READ: “Northeastern became our second family”: Kalhar Pandya and Mansi Modi’s journey in Vancouver

Evan Crow, Huntington 100

As a Global Scholar, Evan Crow spent his first year at Northeastern’s Oakland and London campuses. He worked as a software engineer at cloud-based data platform Snowflake and at web search engine startup Exa.ai, where he built a retrieval augmented answer generation system. For the past three years, he has worked at Apple as a software engineer on co-op.

As president of Kaleidoscope, Khoury College’s club council, Crow led a team to create an environment where clubs can succeed. He launched a program to bridge clubs with co-op faculty and industry, supported global campus development, and hosted direct feedback sessions with club leaders.

Jasmin Duong, Huntington 100

Jasmin Duong’s passion for meaningful impact and community-building led her to mentor her peers as a teaching assistant, volunteer to maintain trails in Arizona’s national parks, and serve unhoused people in Miami. She also pitched and built her own startup through the NU Entrepreneurs Club and helped build and launch two software products as a UX designer and developer for Sandbox, a student-led software consultancy.

Duong worked a UI/UX co-op at smart water cooler company Bevi and will join Bain & Company as a product design co-op later this year.

Juliana Guarrera, Huntington 100

Juliana Guarrera has embraced Northeastern’s global programs, participating in the Summer in Seattle Cloud Computing program, a software engineering Dialogue of Civilizations in Sydney, and an upcoming Dialogue in Kyoto and Osaka. She served as vice president for engagement for Kappa Theta Pi, Northeastern’s professional technical fraternity, and as a teaching assistant. She has also taught technology and coding classes in Boston schools through CodeAdvantage.

Guarrera spent her first co-op in employee experience IT operations at Bain & Company, working between the product management and IT teams. Her upcoming product co-op will be with automated portfolio rebalancing platform Smartleaf.

Aryan Jain, Huntington 100

Aryan Jain’s interest in using data science and business skills for supply chain management has informed his co-ops and extracurriculars. While on a procurement co-op with Insulet Corporation, Jain leveraged his data analytics expertise to manage key performance indicators for suppliers. His upcoming co-op will focus on data science at Johnson & Johnson.

Jain has served as a tech lead for student design studio Scout, director of technology for the Supply Chain Management Club, and associate consultant for health-startup-focused and student-led Vital Ventures. As a research assistant for the SimBioSys Lab, Jain contributed to physics-driven biomolecular modeling tools, working on computational modeling for molecular data files.

Alice Lee, Huntington 100

Alice Lee’s love for entrepreneurship led her to mentor student startups, lead product development for student club Generate, and serve as president of the NU Entrepreneurs Club. She was a student speaker at Northeastern’s Fall 2025 Student Convocation, representing entrepreneurship at Northeastern.

Lee founded a volunteering platform, Karp, that encourages local community service through a gamified app experience. On co-op, she worked at an early-stage financial wellness startup and will start a product management co-op at IBM this fall supporting their data platforms.

Brady Li, Huntington 100

As a first-generation computer science student, Brady Li centered his path on exploring the intersection of human–computer interaction and software engineering. In his first year, he began his extended reality research, which he has since showcased in IEEE publications; one such effort was fully funded and presented in Korea. He later studied quantum computing and philosophy while abroad at Oxford University.

After entering college unsure of his place in technical spaces, Li grew to become president of Northeastern Virtual Reality and mentor students as a teaching assistant. He worked in software engineering while on co-op at Babel Street and has upcoming internships at Meta and Google.

Ashley Lopez, Huntington 100

As a data scientist in manufacturing science and technology at Vertex Pharmaceuticals, Ashley Lopez contributes to data analysis initiatives that support manufacturing efficiency and quality for commercial distribution. Previously, she worked as an IT analyst in criminal justice training, where she analyzed facial recognition data to improve system accuracy and developed reporting processes that enhanced operational workflows.

Lopez applied her machine learning skills to predict movie revenue using real-world datasets and will serve as a volunteer for the FIFA World Cup 2026, leveraging data science to support the media operations team. A first-generation college student, she mentors the next generation as a math and science tutor, using performance data to support her students’ growth.

Rachel Pao, Huntington 100

Rachel Pao’s longstanding interest in cybersecurity has led her to focus on supply chain management. Since she was 17 years old, she has worked at the Department of Defense through the Stokes Educational Scholarship Program on missions spanning operational technology, cryptologic intelligence, and digital network exploitation.

Pao serves as co-executive director of HackBeanpot, a nonprofit hackathon built for first-time hackers, and as head teaching assistant for “Foundations of Cybersecurity.” After graduation, she will begin a four-year service commitment at the Department of Defense.

Benedikt Winkler, Huntington 100

Through myriad roles in Northeastern’s Student Government Association — director of information management, director of student organization governance, vice president of operational affairs, and now executive vice president — Benedikt Winkler has updated recycling signage, launched a residential building composting pilot, and overseen the campus’s more than 500 SGA-recognized clubs.

Winkler served as a software consultant co-op for Verizon through Khoury College’s co-op consulting program and recently accepted a fall co-op at Wayfair as a software engineer. He is also engaged with Northeastern’s theater department, working on lighting design and operations for several productions.

READ: Second wave of Khoury co-op consultants design customer retention software for Verizon

Rae (Rachel) Yan, Huntington 100

Rae Yan has combined her interests in software engineering, videogames, and music throughout her time at Northeastern, from a global co-op in software engineering and marketing at German videogame company Black Soup to creating a brand identity for band goodkarma as part of student-led design studio Scout.

As a production studios assistant for Northeastern Media Studios, Yan operates broadcast and recording equipment across a full-scale production facility that includes a television studio, three recording labs, and a podcast room. She is currently on a co-op as an interactive game developer and designer for entertainment and marketing company Universal Phoenix Group.

Srinivasa Sameer Addepalli, Laurel and Scroll 100

Srinivasa Sameer Addepalli’s software engineering co-op at Fidelity Investments led to his current role as a senior software engineer, in which he builds full stack applications and leads AI initiatives. As a student, he was active in the Aspiring Product Managers Club, including serving as president and leading multiple initiatives to build technical solutions for problems faced by Northeastern students, then strategizing to convert these solutions into wider-reaching startups. He also worked as a graduate teaching assistant for “Web Development” across four semesters.

Nandini Bommireddy, Laurel and Scroll 100

During a software development engineering co-op with Amazon Robotics, Nandini Bommireddy worked on large-scale engineering systems, and will return to work there as a full-time software development engineer after graduation. She has mentored fellow students as a teaching assistant and career peer advisor, served on the Khoury College Master’s Student Advisory Board, helped to organize the Emerald Forge Hackathon in Seattle campus, and contributed to the health care software tool MedQGraph as part of the InsightX Lab.

Ritik Bompilwar, Laurel and Scroll 100

As a generative AI product developer co-op at Northeastern’s Burnes Center for Social Change, Ritik Bompilwar collaborated with Massachusetts’s Operational Services Division to build AI solutions to enhance state procurement. He was part of the team that won the 2025 NASPO Academic Collaboration Award and His thesis, “CrickFACT: Temporal Action Segmentation Guided Framework for Cricket Shot Recognition,” focused on faithful shot recognition in cricket videos using AI.

Himalaya Dua, Laurel and Scroll 100

Himalaya Dua’s pursuit of research, teaching, leadership, hackathons, and industry shaped his Northeastern experience. His research areas include AI, cybersecurity, and multimodal, self-supervised learning for emotion recognition. He built 97 AI projects and participated in 50 hackathons, winning eight — including Nvidia’s AI ML ODSC 2024 hackathon on RAPIDS-accelerated ML workflows.

Dua completed an internship in generative AI at Amazon Web Services and will join AWS full-time as a software development engineer after he graduates. He served as a teaching assistant and a leader for the NU Readers Book Club and received the Northeastern Silicon Valley Leadership Legacy Award.

READ: Himalaya Dua’s 2nd place NVIDIA hackathon win with a last-minute team

Erdun E, Laurel and Scroll 100

Erdun E combined software engineering with student leadership and community building at Northeastern’s Miami campus, earning an Outstanding Global Network Student Award for Miami in 2025.

As founder and president of Miami Tech Club, he strove to bring students together, organize activities and resources for them, and enable them to grow their skills and prepare for their careers. The club even organized its own coding challenge, in which students problem-solved and wrote pseudocode without phones or laptops; E later helped expand the event to other Northeastern campuses.

As a Khoury ambassador and advisory member, E worked to strengthen communication between students, faculty, and staff as one of Northeastern’s newer campuses built out its resources and infrastructure. He also served as a TA for core master’s courses “Program Design Paradigms” and “Algorithms” — grading, holding office hours, and explaining concepts to help fellow students understand core concepts.

Outside of the classroom, E worked as a software engineer for AWS and Superstars, participated in a climate justice hackathon, and joined an entrepreneurship trek with students from other Northeastern campuses.

Kaustubha Eluri, Laurel and Scroll 100

After two years in architecture, Kaustubha Eluri joined Northeastern to pursue computer science with an interest in combining AI, systems, and product thinking to create meaningful user impact. As a teaching assistant for “Mobile Application Development,” he mentored more than 30 students and helped improve evaluation workflows. As a research assistant and software engineer, he built AI-powered accessibility systems to support blind and low-vision users.

Jenish Kothari, Laurel and Scroll 100

Jenish Kothari’s Northeastern experience has been fueled by leadership, technical growth, and the building of impactful systems. As president of the AWS Cloud Club, Kothari grew the group from 10 members to more than 400 within a single semester through technical workshops, speaker events, and collaborative sessions. He focused on building an inclusive and highly engaged community for students interested in cloud and emerging technologies. He also served as a TA for “Database Management Systems” and completed internships at Adobe and Dell, working on real-world, large-scale, data-driven systems.

Dipti Kulkarni, Laurel and Scroll 100

Dipti Kulkarni found her courage to design a career path through the community at Northeastern’s Roux Institute in Portland, Maine. An initial interest in applying technology to animal and environmental welfare led her to Data for Social Good, where she worked on a forecasting model for Shelter Animals Count and contributed to both the National Zoning Atlas and the Knox Clinic van initiative.

As a sustainability ambassador and student leader for Roux Interest in Sustainability and Environment, Kulkarni worked closely with groups like Maine Audubon, GPMetro, and Portland’s park rangers. She helped launch a bus pass program for faculty and staff and built a computer vision-based trash classification app to reduce contamination in campus waste management pipelines.

Nihar Sanda, Laurel and Scroll 100

Throughout his time at Khoury College, Nihar Sanda involved himself in a multitude of research projects, publishing six papers in leading venues. Among other efforts, he collaborated with a NASA team on AI safety in geospatial science and worked with advisors Ayan Paul, Benjamin Gyori, and Auroop Ganguly to build a cross-domain knowledge aggregation system to understand the effects of climate on health. He served as a graduate research assistant, won an award at Khoury Poster Day in 2025, and became a member of Assistant Professor Maitraye Das’ Technology, Equity, and Accessibility Lab.

Outside of the research realm, Sanda completed a co-op at Vanderbilt University and won the Papers2Products hackathon at Northeastern.

Nayonika Sen, Laurel and Scroll 100

Through the Khoury Research Apprenticeship, Nayonika Sen worked under Professor David Bau on National Deep Inference Fabric, an initiative aimed at making powerful AI systems more accessible to the broader research community. In this role, she built tools to track and display how these AI systems were being used.

Sen served as a graduate teaching assistant and research peer advisor, supporting her fellow students. During her internship at Siemens, she developed software tools to streamline engineering workflows and was honored as a finalist at the company’s Intern Impact Awards. A subsequent internship at NVIDIA turned into a full-time, post-graduation position as a software development engineer.

Hunjun Shin, Laurel and Scroll 100

As an active-duty South Korean army captain, Hunjun Shin was awarded a full national defense scholarship by the Republic of Korea’s Ministry of National Defense to pursue a master’s in data science at Northeastern and bring AI capabilities back to the Korean military.

Shin channeled that mission into research under Mohit Singhal at the NULab for Digital Humanities and Computational Social Science, where he studied how the 2018–19 US–North Korea diplomatic summits shaped online discourse on Reddit. He is now investigating social media narratives surrounding the India–Pakistan conflict.

Outside of his research efforts, Shin took first place at the Brain Storm BCI Hackathon 2026 by building a real-time brain signal visualization tool.

Alyssa Smith, Laurel and Scroll 100

As part of the Network Science Institute, Alyssa Smith researches the ways that humans can impact attention structures and information flows on social media platforms and online news ecosystems. Using both qualitative and quantitative methods, she infuses her work with a sense of empathy and care, particularly for marginalized or vulnerable users of social media platforms.

Smith’s PhD is supported by an NSF GRFP award in social sciences. After graduation, she will join the College of the Holy Cross as an assistant professor in statistics and data science.

Shashwath Udaya Kumar, Laurel and Scroll 100

Alfond Scholar Shashwath Udaya Kumar has spent much of his time at the Roux Institute building software for Maine-based organizations that tackle public health problems. Among these are Mother of Fact, a digital health startup focused on maternal and infant nutrition, and Apriqot, a data analytics startup at the intersection of demography, geospatial modeling, and public health surveillance.

With a core team of friends, he participated in student competitions, taking first place at the Spring 2025 Pine Tree Challenge for TransitCare, a caregiver-first non-emergency medical transportation platform designed to help seniors in rural Maine reach medical appointments.

Princewill Chukwuka Umeh, Laurel and Scroll 100

Princewill Chukwuka Umeh joined Northeastern’s Arlington campus as a Gates Millennium Scholar with a simple goal: to be a technologist whose work makes people’s lives easier. He began quickly, participating in the Graduate Leadership Institute’s LEAD360 program before becoming a Khoury graduate admissions ambassador — building relationships with DC-area universities, talking up the Align program, and even reviewing some applicants’ personal statements.

At nonprofit CodePath, Umeh reviewed resumes and ran coaching sessions for students seeking jobs. In addition, he worked with local charter school students who were performing below grade level. Through the African Graduate Student Association, he helped organize the Africa Awards Night and a Black History Month panel designed to help African students find their professional footing.

Umeh competed in hackathons at MIT and Harvard, both of which focused on economic challenges in Africa. During his time at CVS Health, he built an AI chat interface for data scientists working with drug pricing data and helped his team win the CVS Health Corporate Innovation Challenge. He is now in Northeastern’s IDEA accelerator, working to push a startup concept toward product-market fit.

“My time at Northeastern has been full of learning, community, rising above challenges, and believing in my capabilities,” Umeh says.

Songting Yang, Laurel and Scroll 100

Transitioning from a background in finance and business analytics into software engineering through the Align program, Songting Yang developed a strong interest in applying technology to real-world problems. During internships at Google and Oracle, she gained experience in applied AI and distributed systems.  

As an IT support assistant at the Silicon Valley campus, Yang supports technical operations, and as a global student mentor, she helped international students transition into graduate life. She served as president of ACM-W at the Silicon Valley campus. After graduation, she will work on large-scale systems and AI-driven technologies as a full-time software engineer.

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