The new fellowship is designed to advance anti-racism research in technology and engineering, and adds to Baskin Engineering’s expanding portfolio of efforts to increase diversity, equity, and inclusion in STEM.
Degree Program: Network and Digital Technology B.A.
Graduate Institution: UC Santa Cruz
Undergraduate Institution: UC Santa Cruz
Department: Computer Science and Engineering
“Being a computer engineer you can have a lot of choices, whether it’s directly related to computers and making them better and programming applications that do necessary things or whether it’s doing biology, chemistry, physics.”
Degree Program: Natural Language Processing M.S.
Undergraduate Institution: University of California, Santa Cruz
Department: Natural Language Processing
Hometown: Atwater, California
“We’re getting real experts who work in the industry to show us how they use the technology and what they do with it. Getting that perspective is really cool.”
Degree Program: Ph.D., Applied Mathematics
Graduate Institution: UC Santa Cruz
Undergraduate Institution: UC Riverside
Department: Applied Mathematics
Hometown: Phillipines
“I’m mentoring an undergrad right now and what I realized over the course of working with him is the importance of giving students support. My professors and older grad students always gave me that support so it feels good for me to pay that forward.”
Degree Program: Ph.D., Technology and Information Management
Graduate Institution: UC Santa Cruz
Undergraduate Institution: NYU
Department: Computer Science and Engineering
Hometown: Seattle
“I’m working on this human trafficking project. The broad question was whether environmental events affect human traffickers. We found an increase in mentions of certain ethnicities after hurricanes in these ads, especially ethnicities from Caribbean countries.”
Degree Program: Natural Language Processing M.S.
Graduate Institution: University of California, Santa Cruz
Undergraduate Institution: University of California, Santa Cruz
Department: Natural Language Processing
Hometown: Sunnyvale, CA
“It’s amazing hearing from people who are working on NLP now — for example the professor teaching my five o’clock class is teaching at five because he’s working with the technology during the rest of the day. I feel lucky to have these people teaching us.”
The fellowship will allow Duval to concentrate fully on his research, release two serious games applications that he’s developed, and complete his dissertation.
Degree Program: Computer Science, Ph.D.
Graduate Institution: UC Santa Cruz
Undergraduate Institution: University of Pune, India
Department: Computer Science and Engineering
Hometown: Pune, India
“One highlight from the research I’ve done in my Ph.D. program is winning the ACM SIGMOD Student Research Competition in Amsterdam in 2019. It was a very exciting moment for me.”
Baskin Engineering researchers Oskar Elek and Henry Zhou explore new ways machines can process language to improve overall interpretation.
Degree Program: Electrical and Computer Engineering, Ph.D.
Graduate Institution: UC Santa Cruz, University of Science and Technology, Beijing (M.S., Materials Science)
Undergraduate Institution: University of Science and Technology, Beijing
Department: Electrical and Computer Engineering
Hometown: Datong, China
“My dream job would be one where I could develop wearable bioelectronic devices for health monitoring.”
All seventeen of UC Santa Cruz’s graduate engineering programs have chosen to temporarily waive the GRE test requirement for 2021 applicants. Ten programs have permanently dropped the test.
Computational Media Ph.D student Oleksandra Keehl will use the award to help develop a mobile game designed to help Japanese language learners master kanji, Japanese logographic script.