Jacques Cohen Award Winners
Nicole Meng graduated in 2023 with a Bachelor of Science, Summa Cum Laude, in Computer Science (highest honors), Applied math, and Economics. During her time at Brandeis, she consistently served as the Head Teaching Assistant (TA) for three years in various computer science core courses (10a, 12b, 21a, 131a). In her senior year, she completed a publishable honors thesis on Adversarial Machine Learning under the guidance of Dr. Pengyu Hong. Additionally, Nicole gained industry experience through three software engineering internships, the most recent with Pegasystems. Upon graduation, she is pursuing a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering, continuing her research journey in Machine Learning Security.
Ruth Rosenblum graduated with a Bachelor of Science summa cum laude in computer science, linguistics and mathematics. Within computer science, she was especially interested in and passionate about computational linguistics and natural language processing. Ruth will be staying at Brandeis next year to get her master's in computational linguistics. Throughout the last four years, she's been a teaching assistant for several different computer science and linguistics courses, wrote her senior thesis on video-to-video sign language translation with Professor Antonella Di Lillo, and has also been working on a research project in the linguistics department with Professor Sophia Malamud since her first year at Brandeis.
August Soderberg '22, graduated with a Bachelor of Science summa cum laude in computer science and applied mathematics. Between being a teaching assistant for various computer science classes, August contributed to the Campus Rover Project under the Autonomous Robotics Lab with advice from Pito Salas. Additionally, he wrote his undergraduate thesis, "Efficient Dispatching of Autonomous Cargo Vehicles," advised by Pito Salas before graduating and beginning a position at Parallel Systems working on autonomous rail vehicles.
Feng Chen '21, graduated with a Bachelor of Science cum laude in computer science and biochemistry. Feng did research under the Computer Science department for three terms with Professors Hongfu Liu and Pengyu Hong. His research about SARS-CoV-2 virus-host interaction was published on "Cell Patterns."
Hangyu Du '21, graduated with a Bachelor of Science magna cum laude in computer science and economics. Enthusiastic about machine learning and its applications to real-world problems, he conducted a machine learning (ML) research project and an application-oriented ML side project during his time at Brandeis. The research project was about using network science to reveal virus-host interactions under the guidance of Professors Hongfu Liu and Pengyu Hong. This work was published on "Cell Patterns," Volume 2 Issue 5. The side project was about mining multi-modal data to build a standard pipeline for quick disaster response, which ended up as an open-source project.
Sam Stern '20, graduated with a Bachelor of Science summa cum laude with highest honors in computer science. He was a teaching assistant for the Computer Science department for more than two years. In addition, he worked as "guru"' for the department's system operations group. Sam was also the technical director for WBRS 100.1FM, the campus radio station.