Service & Awards
Honors, grants, invited talks and media, program committees, reviewing, and professional memberships.
Honors and Awards
-
Preparing the Professoriate (PTP) Fellow, NC State University — 2025 – 2026
Competitive one-year program of pedagogy seminars, faculty mentorship, and a mentored co-teaching experience, mentored by Dr. Lina Battestilli for CSC 113. -
Best Technical Demonstration Award, AAAI 2025
For MerryQuery: A Trustworthy LLM-Powered Tool Providing Personalized Support for Educators and Students. -
Best Research Paper Award, IEEE VL/HCC 2024
For Jigsaw: A Visual Tool for Decomposing and Planning Programming Problems. -
Ranked First in Master’s Cohort by Cumulative GPA
Highest cumulative GPA in the 2016 master’s cohort in Computer Software Engineering.
Grants and Sponsored Research
- SIGCSE Travel Grant ($360), NC State University — Spring 2026
- Mentored Teaching Fellowship ($1,000), NC State University — Spring 2026
Awarded for co-instruction and the application of evidence-based teaching strategies under the mentorship of Dr. Lina Battestilli. - DELTA Grant, NC State University — 2025 – 2026
Contributor to an awarded $8,000 DELTA grant with Dr. Tiffany Barnes, Dr. DK Xu, and Dr. Lina Battestilli to expand MerryQuery development. - NSF-Funded Research Assistantships, NC State University — 2022 – Present
More than four years of continuous support on NSF-funded Game2Learn projects, including NSF CCRI, NSF Creative CS, ExLENT, and RET. - AAAI 2025 Student Travel Grant ($500) and Computer Science Department Travel Fund ($460), NC State University
- SPLICE LearnLab Summer School Grant — 2023 – 2024
Supported participation in the Educational Data Mining (2023) and Computing Education Research (2024) tracks at Carnegie Mellon’s LearnLab Summer School.
Invited Talks, Panels, Workshops, and Media
- Toward Human-AI Co-Intelligence in Computing Education — Guest Talk, Spring 2026
Evidence synthesis, industry perspectives, tool design, interventions, and human–AI response evaluation, for NC State’s Advanced Topics in Efficient Deep Learning. - Graduate Life and PhD Experience — Panel, Fall 2025
- MerryQuery — Guest Talk, Utah State University, Fall 2025
AI in education and the status of MerryQuery, in a graduate Natural Language Processing course. - MerryQuery — Guest Talk, NC State DELTA AI Roundtable, Fall 2025
- AI in Education — Root Access Podcast, Summer 2025
- Computing Education and Generative AI — AIhub Interview, Aug 2025
- AAAI 2025 Demonstration Award — NC State CS News Feature, Spring 2025
- MerryQuery — Poster, NC State Applied AI in Engineering & Computer Science Symposium, Fall 2024
Presented MerryQuery’s design and early classroom deployment with Dr. DK Xu and Dr. Tiffany Barnes. - PhD in CS Experience — Panel, NC State Doctoral Recruiting Day, Spring 2024
- Developing Effective Research Questions — Workshop for undergraduate research interns, Summer 2023 and 2024
- How to Present Research — Workshop for undergraduate research interns, Summer 2023
- From the Internet of Things to Fog Computing — Guest Lecture, 2018
Program Committee Member
| Venue | Year |
|---|---|
| ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE) | 2026 |
| ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research (ICER) | 2026 |
| AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence | 2026 |
| ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) | 2025 – 2026 |
| International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) | 2025 |
| IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE) | 2024 – 2025 |
| International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED) | 2025 |
| AAAI Spring Symposium: GenAI@Edge — Empowering Generative AI at the Edge | 2025 |
| ACM International Conference on Learning Analytics & Knowledge (LAK) | 2025 |
| IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON) | 2025 |
| ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) | 2023 – 2025 |
Journal Reviewer
- Empirical Software Engineering
- IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies
Memberships
| Organization | Year |
|---|---|
| Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) | 2025 – Present |
| IEEE Student Member | 2018; 2023 – Present |
| ACM Student Member | 2023 – Present |
| Sigma Xi | 2025 – 2026 |