News and Events
Nolan McKenna Awarded NCAA Post Graduate Scholarship
Congratulations to Nolan McKenna, class of ’25, on being selected as the Men’s Indoor Track and Field recipient of the 2024-25 NCAA Postgraduate Scholarship program. As noted by bantamsports.com, the NCAA awarded $10,000 to 42 exceptional student-athletes as part of its Postgraduate Scholarship program. These student-athletes, representing winter sports across all three NCAA divisions, have demonstrated outstanding academic achievements, athletic excellence and leadership within their communities. As a member of the Track and Field program, Nolan is the record holder in the 400 meter and the 600 meter dashes, and is a member of the record-holding indoor and outdoor 4×400 relays, breaking a 21-year old program record in the outdoor relay. Nolan also won Trinity’s ECAC Award, which is given to the senior male scholar athlete of the year. Nolan will be pursuing an MEng in Computer Science with a focus on computer networks and cybersecurity at Cornell’s graduate campus in NYC. For more information, click here.
Professor Syta Receives Dana Research Associate Professor Award
Professor Ewa Syta was awarded a Charles Dana Research Associate Professor award at the 2025 Commencement Ceremony. The Charles Professorship was established to support one full professor and two associate professors for whom a period of reduced teaching responsibilities would enable the recipients to move forward with an important piece of research. Historically, the award has been given to faculty with a considerable track-record of published scholarship who are at critical junctures of research and who would benefit from having the released time.
Computer Science Students Receive Awards at 2025 Honors Day
Congratulations to the Computer Science students who received awards at the 2025 Honors Day ceremony. Prize recipients included Anthony Smaldore, Tadija Ciric, and Yusuke Abe, 2025 winners of The Travelers Companies Foundation Senior Research Prize for their project entitled “Clarity”. This prize is awarded to student(s) whose senior research project in the field of computer science has been deemed the most outstanding by an independent board chosen from Trinity faculty and The Travelers staff.
Matthew Birnhak ’25, was awarded the 2025 Ralph A. Morelli Prize in Computer Science. This prize was established to honor Professor Ralph A. Morelli, Professor of Computer Science, and one of the founding members of the Computer Science Department. The prize recognizes a rising senior computer science major who has demonstrated outstanding academic achievement in computer science.
Seniors BDS Aritra ’25 and Mia Creane ’25 received the Bronzell Dinkins Senior Service Award. This award was established in memory of Bronzell Dinkins, Visiting Laboratory Instructor in Computer Science, to recognize a senior for exceptional service to the Computer Science Department.
Hyun Lee ’24, was awarded the 2025 Ralph E. Walde Prize in Computer Science. This prize was established to honor Professor Ralph E. Walde, Professor of Computer Science, and one of the founding members of the Computer Science Department. The prize recognizes a rising senior computer science major who has demonstrated outstanding academic achievement in computer science.
Celebrating Seniors and the Semester
Three Computer Science events held at the semester’s end, celebrated our graduating seniors. All the computer science students were invited to participate in the Semester Send-Off Kite Flying event that was held on the Gates Quad. Expert kite flyers, including Professor Chakraborttii, helped the first timers and, with favorable winds, an occasional tangle of lines, and two fly-away kites, a fun time was had by all. The Kite Fly was followed by the Senior Dinner at a local hibachi restaurant, where both students and faculty received cords commemorating the 50th anniversary of Computer Science degrees being awarded by Trinity. The double cords were gold for the 50th anniversary, and maroon, representing MECC, the brick building that houses the Computer Science Department, along with hand-sewn “50” and “2025” medallions. Finally seniors were given Computer Science jackets on Jacket Day, in commemoration of their time at Trinity.
Traveler’s Senior Project Presentations
Seniors showcased their capstone senior projects, which they designed and implements over the course of the year, at the annual Travelers Presentations. The projects were evaluated by alumna and representative of the Travelers Insurance Company, Michelle England, to determine the winners of the Travelers Companies Foundation Senior Research Prize , which is awarded at the Trinity Honors Day Ceremony. Of the 17 individual and group projects presented, Anthony Smaldore, Tadija Ciric, and Yusuke Abe Travelers Companies Foundation Senior Research Prize for Clarity, an iOS application that enables real-time speech transcription, translation, and text-to-speech playback. The first runner up prize was awarded to Meg Allen, for her project NutrIQ, a nutrition assistant designed to help users eat smarter, feel better, and stay consistent. The second runner up prize was awarded to Tarek Solamy, Mohammad Asir and Armen Nanayan for their project GraphGuard, a diffusion-based model for detecting and mitigating anomalies in dynamic graphs.
Seniors Participate in Spring Research Symposium
Computer Science seniors presented posters of their senior projects at Trinity’s Spring Research Symposium. Held in the Washington Room, the event provides students from all disciplines the opportunity to showcase their research and allows the Trinity community to learn about student work across a wide range of fields. The Computer Science Department awards prizes for the best Computer Science posters, based on votes from department faculty. This year’s Poster Prize winners were, Matt Birnhak, whose poster for the project Digital Identity Wallet won first place, Shash Sunkum and BDS Aritra, whose poster for the project DiscountByte won second place, and Meg Allen, whose poster NutrIQ, won third place.
Create and Connect!
The final Create and Connect event of the year was held in the Alumni Lounge and featured cookie decorating. This event series, launched in the fall by Professor Spezialetti, was originally designed to help women computer science students connect through creative activities. The inaugural event focused on junk journaling with an autumn theme. The second Valentine-making event was co-organized with Mathematics Professor Kirstie Kuenzel, expanding the scope to include both Computer Science and Mathematics students. The final cookie-decorating event further broadened participation to include women from across all STEM fields. The Create and Connect events are intended to foster creativity while providing a welcoming space for students to meet new friends and build community. The events are open to all.
I ♥ Computing Pop-Up Party
What better way to shakoff the February chill than with a surprise Pop-Up “I ♥ Computing” Party? Students and faculty took a much-needed pizza break, new faces in computing classes got to mingle with majors, and everyone left with grab-and-go snacks to power their next study session. It was the perfect mix of food, fun, and friendly faces—a celebration of all the reasons to love computing.
Professor Spezialetti Featured Speaker at WITT
Professor Madalene Spezialetti was the featured faculty speaker at Trinity’s Winter Institute on Teaching with Technology which had the theme “Making AI Work for You and Your Students”. Professor Spezialetti discussed the experience of teaching her newly created First Year Seminar “Didn’t Humans Used to Do That? Collaborating and Co-Creating with AI”. The course fully embraced the use of generative AI in a wide range of creative contexts including creating junk journal collages, writing interactive poems, transforming themselves in to super-hero with accompanying comic-book stories, creating and performing a participatory experimental music event in the chapel, and even writing computer programs. More information on her class can be viewed here.
Trinity Teams Win Prizes at WesHack 2024
Congratulations to two Trinity teams for their success at WesHack 2024, held at Wesleyan University. The team of Kamilla Volkova, Yeabsira Bizualem, Hanna Saffi, and AJ Baily won 2nd Prize overall at WesHack. In just 24 hours, they developed Art Sphere, a web app designed to help users track the art they have explored, create a wish list of pieces they want to see in the future, and access detailed information about specific artworks.
The team of Shivanshu Dwivedi, Lucas Hyun Lee, and Anupam Khargharia won the Internship/Sustainability Track for their project, Shelf Aware. This innovative tool leverages a fine-tuned OCR model and web scraping to analyze products and URLs, generating sustainability, reliability, and health indexes to help users make more informed choices. It also suggests better alternatives for products and gamifies eco-friendly decisions by awarding points that can be redeemed for coupons at eco-conscious businesses.
CS Faculty Honored with Faculty Excellence Awards
Professors Chakraborttii, Islam, Spezialetti, and Syta were honored at Trinity College’s inaugural Faculty Excellence Awards ceremony on October 17.
“Trinity College is consistently recognized for the quality of teaching that benefits our students and our world,” said President Joanne Berger-Sweeney at the event. “Today we celebrate our faculty not only for their scholarship but for their unwavering commitment to nurturing minds and the liberal arts.”
Professors Chakraborttii, Islam, and Spezialetti were among 20 faculty members who received the Mentoring Students Prize, awarded in recognition of those who have demonstrated exceptional dedication to mentoring-intensive activities, including academic advising, and advising senior projects and independent studies.
Professor Syta was honored with an Outstanding Scholar Award in recognition of significant scholarly achievements completed in the past year.
Kiet Ha Presents Research in Japan
Trinity College student Kiet Ha presented the research paper at the 2024 IEEE 48th Annual Computers, Software, and Applications Conference (COMPSAC) in Osaka, Japan. The paper, “Improving Insurance Fraud Detection with Generated Data,” was co-authored by Lucas Stowe and Professor Chakraborttii, and grew out of the senior project of Kiet and Lucas Stowe that for which Professor Chakraborttii served as the advisor. The paper addresses the $40 billion annual cost of insurance fraud by proposing a novel approach using synthetic data to enhance fraud detection capabilities. This innovative research tackles data scarcity, data privacy and class imbalance challenges, contributing to advancing fraud detection techniques in the insurance domain. To read the abstract of his talk click here.
Sarah Durkee Awarded Fulbright Grant
Sarah Durkee ’24, won a Fulbright Combined Award for Austria. Sarah was an Interdiscplinary Computing Major with Philosophy and will perform research, take classes, and teach English during the 2024–25 academic year in Vienna, where Sigmund Freud, the neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis, worked and lived much of his life.
Through journals and correspondence, Durkee hopes to understand Freud’s philosophy on the technology growth of the 20th century and to use it in the context of today’s emerging artificial intelligence (AI) technology. Beyond her research, Durkee will teach English to secondary school students and will take classes at the University of Vienna, where Freud earned a degree in medicine.
Henry Shapiro, 2024 Valedictorian, Bernardo Simones, Trustee Excellence Awardee
Congratulations to Henry Shapiro, the Class of 2024 Valedictorian and a double major in Computer Science and Mathematics. This marks the second year in a row that a Computer Science student has been named Valedictorian—following Keelyn McNamara, the 2023 Valedictorian, who majored in Interdisciplinary Computing with Studio Arts. Bernardo (Benny) Simones was also honored at graduation with The Trustee Award for Student Excellence which is presented annually to a full-time senior(s) who has compiled an outstanding academic record and whose achievements in one or more other areas of activity, such as athletics, campus or community service, or leadership of student organizations, exemplify the high standards of excellence to which Trinity College expects all of its students to aspire. The recipient is chosen by the Board of Trustees in the spring. Congratulations to all of our graduating seniors.
Students Receive Awards at 2024 Honors Day
Congratulations to the Computer Science students who received awards at the 2025 Honors Day ceremony. Prize recipients included Stephan Antogiovanni, winner of the 2025 Travelers Companies Foundation Senior Research Prize for his project “From Pixels to Prognosis: A Histological Cancer Detection System Using Machine Learning on Digital Pathology Mobile App”. This prize is awarded to student(s) whose senior research project in the field of computer science has been deemed the most outstanding by an independent board chosen from Trinity faculty and The Travelers staff.
Matthew Birnhak was awarded the 2025 Ralph A. Morelli Prize in Computer Science. This prize was established to honor Professor Ralph A. Morelli, Professor of Computer Science, and one of the founding members of the Computer Science Department. The prize recognizes a rising senior computer science major who has demonstrated outstanding academic achievement in computer science.
Senior Michael Monti received the 2024 Bronzell Dinkins Senior Service Award. This award was established in memory of Bronzell Dinkins, Visiting Laboratory Instructor in Computer Science, to recognize a senior for exceptional service to the Computer Science Department.
Matthew Birnhak ’25, was awarded the 2024 Ralph E. Walde Prize in Computer Science. This prize was established to honor Professor Ralph E. Walde, Professor of Computer Science, and one of the founding members of the Computer Science Department. The prize recognizes a rising senior computer science major who has demonstrated outstanding academic achievement in computer science.
Professor Syta Receives Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award
Trinity College Associate Professor of Computer Science Ewa Syta has received a prestigious Fulbright U.S. Scholar award for 2024-25 to conduct research in her native country of Poland.
The Fulbright Program– led by the United States government in partnership with more than 160 countries worldwide—offers international educational and cultural exchange programs for passionate and accomplished students, scholars, artists, teachers, and professionals of all backgrounds to study, teach, or pursue important research and professional projects. In collaboration with researchers at Poland’s National Research Institute under the supervision of the Ministry of Digital Affairs, Syta plans to develop a long-term strategy for the implementation of a digital identity wallet for Poland. For more information of Professor and her Fulbright plans, click here.
