"The work of these awardees exemplifies the outstanding research being done by PhD students in CS. Jeehan studies how assistive technologies can be best used to guide the behavior of users. Dat investigates machine learning methods that lend themselves to being understood by humans. Hussam studies how online radicalization is influenced by a social media platform's architecture, algorithms, policies, and users."
- Prof. Kasturi Varadarajan
Director of Graduate Studies — CS
“We are very pleased with our students’ success in obtaining prestigious fellowships from the Graduate College. Muhammed Ali Sit is conducting research on applying machine learning methods to rainfall and streamflow that are relevant to flood prediction. Min Zhang’s research is at the intersection of machine learning, natural language processing, and social media.”
- Prof. Juan Pablo Hourcade
Director of Graduate Studies — IGPI
About the Spring 2023 Graduate College Fellows
PhD candidates Dat Hong* (Computer Science - 6th year), Jeehan Malik (Computer Science - 6th year), and Muhammed Ali Sit (IGPI | Information Science - 4th year) were awarded a Ballard and Seashore Dissertation Fellowship.
Fellow doctorate students Hussam Habib (CS - 4th year) and Min Zhang (IGPI | Information Science - 4th year) have received Graduate College Post-Comprehensive Research Fellowships for Spring 2023.
"I am very grateful and honored to receive this award and recognition. The financial protection allowed through this award would enable me to focus on my research understanding how social media platforms affect the ideological beliefs of users and to make these platforms a healthier place for the discussion of difficult topics."
- Hussam Habib
Advisor: Rishab Nithyanand
"I would like to thank our department and my advisors for all your support. The Ballard and Seashore Dissertation Fellowship will allow me to focus on my dissertation on building explainable machine learning models on sequence data."
- Dat Hong
Advisors: Alberto Segre; Tong Wang [Management Science]
"The Ballard and Seashore fellowship will allow me to focus on completing my dissertation for the coming semester. My dissertation will explore how pedestrians respond to safety applications built with emerging technologies. Through this fellowship, I will have protected time to complete my ongoing research projects and the writing of my dissertation. I am excited to accept this fellowship and complete the remaining work for my PhD!"
- Jeehan Malik
Advisor: Joseph K. Kearney
"This fellowship will allow me to focus on the remaining components of my dissertation."
- Muhammed Ali Sit
Advisor: Ibrahim Demir [Civil and Environmental Engineering]
"The post-comp fellowship will allow me to continue to focus on my research on innovation detection and assessment using advanced NLP techniques."
- Min Zhang
Advisors: Weiguo (Patrick) Fan [Business Analytics]
* Hong chose to pursue an internship opportunity for Spring '23.
GEM Employer Fellow
Jamil Gafur (3rd Year PhD Student) was awarded a GEM Employer Fellowship for the 2022-23 academic year.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL)and the University of Iowa co-sponsor this fellowship. As part of this program Gafur interned at the NREL in Summer 2022.
Jamil was kind enough to answer a few questions for us here.
About the Fellowships
Ballard and Seashore Dissertation Fellowship
This fellowship program provides an opportunity for Ph.D. students to benefit from a final semester of protected and supported time to focus on completing their scholarly research activities and the writing of their dissertations.
Graduate College Post-Comprehensive Research Fellowship
This fellowship program provides an opportunity for advanced Ph.D. students to benefit from protected and supported time to pursue their scholarly research activities. The fellowship 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.
GEM offers MS and Ph.D. level students an outstanding opportunity and access to dozens of the top Engineering and Science firms and Universities in the nation. The GEM Fellowship was designed to focus on promoting opportunities for individuals to enter industry at the graduate level in areas such as research and development, product development, and other high level technical careers. GEM also offers exposure to a number of opportunities in academia.