December 11, 2023

Shivika Prasanna, a Ph.D. student in computer science, has received a prestigious Academic Achievement Award from Upsilon Pi Epsilon (UPE).

She was one of just nine students to be recognized with the award from UPE the International Honor Society for the Computing and Information Disciplines.

Prasanna is a final year Ph.D. student in the Scalable Data Science (SDS) lab supervised by Associate Professor Praveen Rao.

Her research focuses on representing COVID-19 genomic data as a large and scalable, information-rich knowledge graph, which allows her to apply graph machine learning to infer new knowledge. The work aims to simplify labor- and time-intensive tasks for those working in bioinformatics. Specifically, it could expand the potential of facilitating cross-species information retrieval, which could have a variety of applications.

Her Ph.D. research has been funded with grants from both the National Science Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities.

“I would like to thank Dr. Kamrul Islam, department chair, Dr. Praveen Rao, my Ph.D. advisor, and Dr. Michael Jurczyk, the UPE chapter advisor, for their constant support, encouragement and for the several opportunities they have provided,” said Prasanna, who received the “Outstanding Ph.D. Student” award from the department earlier this year.