School Award Winners Impress on World, National, and Institute Stages

The dictionary is the only place where success comes before work. The College of Computing’s 34th Annual Awards Celebration on April 8 offered a venue to honor the hard work and ensuing success of students, faculty, staff, and alumni in 2024-2025.

“In this past year, my first as the dean of computing, I have seen exactly how much work it takes from everyone to keep this community going, not to mention excelling,” said Vivek Sarkar, dean and John P. Imlay Jr. Chair of the College of Computing. 

“We are strong across the board, and that makes our winners all the more impressive.”

The School of Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) is one unit that reinforces the College’s emphasis on collaboration, problem solving, and excellence. By earning awards this year at the College, Institute, and levels beyond, the School of CSE continues to distinguish itself as a top-tier department for research and learning.

Select award winners from the School of CSE recognized at this year’s banquet were:

• Professor Polo Chau- Dean’s Award
• Pratham Mehta, M.S. CS student- The Donald V. Jackson Fellowship
• Parisa Babolhavaeji- The Marshall D. Williamson Fellowship
• Aeree Cho, Ph.D. student- Rising Star Doctoral Student Research Award
• Alumnus Zijie (Jay) Wang (Ph.D. ML-CSE 2024)- Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award

The College of Computing also recognized awardees with ties to the School of CSE. These included: 

• Lecturer and alumnus Max Roozbahani (Ph.D. CSE 2019)- William A. "gus" Baird Faculty Teaching Award. Instructor of the online section of CSE6242: Data and Visual Analytics.
• Lecturer and alumnus Nimisha Roy (Ph.D. CSE 2021)- William D. "Bill" Leahy Jr. Outstanding Instructor Award
• Teaching Assistant Susanta Routray- Outstanding Instructional Associate Teaching Award. Co-head TA of the online section of CSE6242: Data and Visual Analytics.

Chau teaches the CSE6242 course, and advises Babolhavaeji, Cho, Mehta, and Wang. Along with the College of Computing awards, Chau received the Innovator’s Award at the M.S. Analytics Ten Year Anniversary. He has served as the program’s associate director since 2014 and over 1,000 students have taken his data and visual analytics course each semester in recent years.

Along with receiving the College of Computing’s dissertation, Wang received a 2025 Outstanding Dissertation Award from the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (ACM SIGCHI).

SIGCHI is the world’s largest association of human-computer interaction professionals and practitioners. Wang is one of five recipients of the award this year.

Earlier in the year, Forbes recognized Wang by naming him to its 30 Under 30 in Science for 2025. 

Wang’s dissertation earned him the 2025 Best Ph.D. Thesis Award from the Georgia Tech Sigma Chi chapter. 

At the same ceremony, Sigma Chi presented Regents’ Professor Mark Borodovsky with the Best Faculty Paper Award for his work on GeneMark-ETP. Borodovsky holds joint appointments with the School of CSE and the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering.

Trailblazing work in biocomputing earned Regents’ Professor Srinivas Aluru the 2025 Charles Babbage Award. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Computer Society (IEEE CS) presented the award for Aluru’s pioneering contributions intersecting parallel computing and computational biology.

News of Aluru’s Babbage Award arrived at the same time the College of Computing announced the appointments of associate deans. The College appointed Aluru as senior associate dean, and Associate Professor Elizabeth Cherry became associate dean for graduate education.

Aluru and Cherry’s appointments marked the first time in the School’s history that faculty represented the School as associate deans. 

Aluru ended his role as executive director of Georgia Tech’s Institute for Data Engineering and Science (IDEaS) when he accepted the senior associate dean role. In his place, IDEaS appointed Regents’ Professor C. David Sherrill as interim executive director. 

Sherrill holds joint appointments with CSE and the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. He has served as associate director of IDEaS since its founding in 2016. His appointment as interim executive director comes after his election to the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science (IAQMS).

Cherry's appointment as associate dean was one of many accolades she received in 2025. In March, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) selected her as a Class of 2025 Fellow, recognizing her contributions to computational cardiology research and extensive service to the SIAM community. Cherry is the fifth faculty member from the School of CSE selected as a SIAM Fellow.

Cherry co-chaired the organizing committee for the SIAM Conference on Computational Science and Engineering (CSE25). She is also serving a second consecutive term as a SIAM council member-at-large.

Members of the SIAM Activity Group on Computational Science and Engineering (SIAG/CSE) elected School of CSE Professor and Associate Chair Edmond Chow as vice chair. Chow’s two-year term began in January after serving as the group’s program director.

Cherry previously served as the School of CSE’s associate chair for academic affairs. When she accepted her new associate dean role, the School appointed B. Aditya Prakash as associate chair.

Prakash was one of three School of CSE faculty members who received promotions that take effect in July. He was promoted to full professor. Assistant Professors Chao Zhang and Xiuwei Zhang earned tenure and promotions. Each has been promoted to associate professor.

Prakash advised Alexander Rodríguez (Ph.D. CS 2023), now an assistant professor at the University of Michigan. Rodríguez won an outstanding dissertation award runner-up at the International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2024).

Rodríguez’s dissertation on Artificial Intelligence for Data-centric Surveillance and Forecasting of Epidemics earned him the College of Computing's Outstanding Dissertation Award in 2024.

Assistant Professor Florian Schäfer co-authored a paper selected for one of five best technical paper awards at the annual conference for ACM’s Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH 24). 

Schäfer’s work in numerical computation and statistical inference led to his appointment as an initiative lead within Georgia Tech’s Institute for Matter and Systems (IMS). IMS selected Schäfer to lead the initiative on Matter and Information, looking to him to facilitate innovative approaches and impact in alignment with IMS’ mission.

Assistant Professor Spencer Bryngelson and his group received an ACCESS-CI Maximize allocation from the National Science Foundation. The award amounts to 225,000 GPU hours annually to run their multiphase fluid flow simulation algorithms on powerful supercomputers.

One of Bryngelson’s Ph.D. students, Ben Wilfong, received the 2024-2025 CRNCH Fellowship. Wilfong will use the fellowship to optimize superchip architectures, such as NVIDIA Grace Hopper and AMD MI300A.

Early in the year, Suzan Manasreh and Elizabeth Hong won President’s Undergraduate Research Awards (PURA) for Fall 2024. Manasreh studies in Bryngelson’s group, and Professor Rich Vuduc advises Hong. 

M.S. CSE student Grace Driskill attained achievement in the classroom, on the track, and cross country courses. The first-ever School of CSE student-athlete earned a third selection to an All-ACC academic team.

Driskill made history by recording the fourth fastest 3000-meter time in history of the Georgia Tech Women’s Indoor Track program. She clocked a 9:22.21 on Feb. 15 at Boston University’s David Hemery Valentine Invitational.

Students praised Assistant Professor Raphaël Pestourie, who was selected for the Fall 2024 CIOS Honor Roll. The honor roll recognized Pestourie for outstanding teaching and educational impact through his CSE 8803: Scientific Machine Learning course.

In the waning weeks of the semester, CSE-AE Ph.D. student Atticus Rex received the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) award for computational and data-enabled science research. Rex is advised by Assistant Professor Elizabeth Qian, who holds joint appointments with the School of CSE and the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering.

In March, the American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical and Petroleum Engineers (AIME) awarded honorary membership to Regents’ Professor Surya Kalidindi. Kalidindi is affiliated with the School of CSE, the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, and the School of Materials Science and Engineering.