Huyen Le and Yi Xu were awarded the Spring 2019 Ballard and Seashore Dissertation Fellowships. Shehroze Farooqi and Tanmay Inamdar were awarded the Spring 2019 Post-comprehensive Research Fellowships.

Huyen Le is a 6^th year PhD student and an advisee of Prof. Zubair Shafiq. She was on a Vietnamese Education Foundation (VEF) Fellowship during 2013-15 and received a post-comprehensive research fellowship in Spring 2018. Huyen works in the inter-disciplinary area of computational social science and studies how social phenomena (e.g., elections) are affected as they are increasingly mediated through social media and algorithmic choices.

Yi Xu is a 5^th year PhD student and an advisee of Prof. Tianbao Yang and Prof. Qihang Lin (Management Sciences). His research interest is in Machine Learning and in particular stochastic optimization techniques for machine learning problems. Yi is a coauthor on several papers in top Machine Learning conferences such as NIPS and ICML.

Shehroze Farooqi is a 4^th year PhD student and an advisee of Prof. Zubair Shafiq. His research focuses on identifying and measuring reputation manipulation in online services, including social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter and search engines such as Google. Shehroze's research aims to identify security vulnerabilities in these online services that allow manipulation to take place and to measure the volume of manipulation occurring.

Tanmay Inamdar is a 4^th year PhD student and an advisee of Prof. Kasturi Varadarajan. His research is on the design of approximation algorithms for geometric problems. Tanmay is also interested in designing distributed approximation algorithms.

Both award programs provide an opportunity for advanced doctoral students to benefit from protected and supported time to pursue their scholarly research activities.

The Graduate College Post-Comprehensive Research Award is intended to recognize students with distinguished academic achievement during their early graduate training. These achievements should be evident from a combination of outstanding academic performance in coursework, as well as early scholarly research activities. Students who have held teaching assistantships in the previous two semesters will have priority.