Photo by Alyssa Stone/Northeastern University

On April 18, Northeastern University held its 14^th annual Academic Honors Convocation, in which students from across the university were honored for their determination and for making the most of the opportunities before them. To meet Khoury College’s undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral student winners, click any of the linked names below, or simply read on.

Huntington 100 (outstanding undergraduate students): James Chang-Davidson, William Cutler, Jona Fejzaj, Will Hanvey, Taeyoon (Kevin) Jin, Jocelyn Ju, Hunter Rudnet, Aarshiya Sachdeva, Erica Sammarco, Sara Takhim

Lux. Veritas. Virtus. (outstanding master’s students): Spencer Belsky, Vidya Ganesh, Tom Henehan, Annie Pates, Shagun Saboo, Manikhanta Praphul Samavedam, Daniel Bi, Niyati Khandelwal, Peiying Li, LeAnn Mendoza, Ziyun Chen

NSF Graduate Reseach Fellowships: Diego Rivera, Sabra Sisler, Neel Sortur, Stanley Wu

Fulbright Scholarship (for researching, studying, or teaching English abroad): Maxwell Pirtle

Sears B. Condit Award (outstanding academic achievement): Neeti Desai

Outstanding Graduate Student Award in Humanics: Ryan Muther

Outstanding Graduate Student Award in Teaching: Diptendu Kar

James Chang-Davidson, Huntington 100

One commencement-season honor isn’t enough for James Chang-Davidson. Even two is too few. He walked the stage with three honors in tow: the Huntington 100, plus Northeastern’s Compass Award and the Lasting Impact Award from the annual Student Life Awards.

It’s a haul that recognizes Chang Davidson’s immense and varied contributions to Northeastern student life. In his work with the Northeastern Electric Racing club — which designs, builds, and races formula-style electric racecars — Chang Davidson jumped from project manager to vice president to president, and established a software team that expanded to handle web development, data analysis and visualization, and vehicle interface and controls. In addition, he was the founder and president of Kaleidoscope, which serves as a council to unite and support Khoury student groups, with the goal of creating a lasting synergy among the college’s student groups.

Tack on his involvement with oSTEM, Out in Business, the College of Engineering’s Student Activities Council, and Northeastern’s Student Government Association, and you have a textbook advertisement for the benefits of student life, not just for Chang Davidson, but for the students around him as well.

William Cutler, Huntington 100

After arriving at Northeastern undeclared as part of the Explore program, it took William Cutler nearly two years to settle on his combined major of computer science and physics. In the three years since, be it co-ops or research, he has run with every opportunity.

Cutler’s first co-op role was a development position with the API team at CNC Software, where he helped debug code and maintain the software’s usability. His second was with Amazon Robotics’ resource management team, where he optimized warehouse robots and debugged their software.

Then, after receiving funding through Northeastern’s PEAK Trail-Blazer Award, Cutler worked in a trapped ion lab at Oxford University last summer, where he contributed to calibration experiments for trapped-ion quantum computers.

“Calibration is a big deal in experimental physics to make sure all your devices are working properly,” Cutler says. “That was an incredibly exciting project to be working on, both geographically and intellectually.”

Following his time abroad, Cutler completed his final co-op with NK Labs in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he worked on a muon-catalyzed nuclear fusion experiment — a large-scale effort to create novel fusion conditions and measure the outcomes using precision detectors. The experiment required a specialized beam of muons, which Cutler and his team helped to create and deploy over two months at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland.

“It was really an incredible experience of getting the full picture of research, from reading papers and coming up with an idea to testing it, iterating, and prototyping,” Cutler says. “It really filled out for me what being an experimental physics researcher would be like.”

After graduation, Cutler will pursue a doctorate in atomic and laser physics at Oxford, where he will continue to research trapped-ion quantum computers.

Jona Fejzaj, Huntington 100

When Jona Fejzaj started her college journey, she wasn’t at Northeastern. She wasn’t a computer science major. She had never written a line of code.

But after transferring to Northeastern for her third year, Fejzaj reshaped her academic focus entirely, first selecting a combined computer science and math major, then stacking experiences at a striking rate. TA for “Object-Oriented Design.” Project manager with Enabling Engineering, where she oversaw development of a Roku device for a user with cerebral palsy. Participant in Moving the Cities, a weeklong international program where entrepreneurial students innovate to address global challenges. Web developer at Forge, where she helped develop a water bottle with tracking capabilities. Participant in Break Though Tech AI, where she worked on a model to classify plant specimens in the New York Botanical Garden. Quantitative research co-op in Chicago at UBS, where she works on workflow streamlining and portfolio optimization.

READ: Tech solutions for global crises: Jona Fejzaj’s take on Moving the Cities

After graduation, Fejzaj hopes to attend grad school and work as a machine learning engineer, with a focus on developing equitable machine learning models and reducing algorithmic bias.

Will Hanvey, Huntington 100

When your data science journey encompasses public transit, soccer, Asian politics, and whale sharks, you’ve charted a path unto yourself.

Such is the path of Will Hanvey, who helped create a combined data science and international affairs major at Northeastern, then tacked on minors in economics, Japanese language, and East Asian studies. He blended all five fields throughout his time as a Husky, but especially so in 2023, almost all of which he spent in Asia. What begin with a study abroad at the University of Tokyo and a visit to all 47 Japanese prefectures continued with a co-op at Taiwan’s first international think tank. On weekends and holidays, Hanvey voyaged around Southeast Asia, swimming with whale sharks in the Philippines and meeting elephants in Thailand.

Hanvey’s Boston-based days were eventful too. When he wasn’t doing predictive modeling for the T or the 2022 FIFA World Cup, he was co-oping at Lightcast, where he investigated gaps between the skills colleges teach and the skills the labor market seeks. Hanvey also helped lead the International Relations Council and collaborated with Northeastern’s World Languages Center to create a chapter of the Japanese National Honor Society.

With one semester remaining before he graduates, Hanvey plans to return to Japan as a data science co-op for the Hiroshima Toyo Carp in Nippon Professional Baseball — the final co-op in his nascent data science career.

Jocelyn Ju, Huntington 100

After joining Northeastern undeclared through the Explore program, Jocelyn Ju found her niche: using data science in service of sustainability and the environment. Along the way, she completed a handful of co-ops in AI, data science, and sustainable investing, served as a leader and ambassador in the Explore program, and competed for Northeastern’s club taekwondo and women’s hockey teams. She also earned several honors, including the Asian American Center’s Student Engagement Award, the Joseph E. and Zeina Aoun Global Experience Scholarship, and a Northeastern Honors Scholarship.

Ju is currently studying abroad at the University of Sydney in Australia, where she’s undertaking service learning in Indigenous communities and analyzing drone imagery to predict pasture biomass and quality. Unlike most Huntington 100 honorees, she has a year left before graduation, at which point she plans to pursue employment for a year or two, pinpoint her next area of study, and pursue a master’s degree.

Taeyoon (Kevin) Jin, Huntington 100

By the time he arrived at Northeastern, Kevin Jin had two programming and design ventures under his belt. The first was a company he founded at age 13, one that leveraged Jin’s virtualization solution to provide affordable servers to small businesses. The second came through a high-school internship at venture capital firm SOSV, where he parlayed lessons from other founders into Keo, a learning management software system for schools with limited resources. Jin raised more than $500,000 to further the venture, which now has more than three million student users.

Jin continued his entrepreneurial streak at Northeastern when, as a second-year student, he joined global software consulting firm Revox. Over the next few years, including through two unconventional own-venture co-ops funded by NU’s Center for Entrepreneurship, Jin quintupled the size of the Revox team, served as interim CEO, and helped revamp the company’s internal processes. When he wasn’t doing that, he was boosting other students’ ventures through the Husky Startup Challenge, for which he served as co-director and startup mentor. In the research realm, Jin has studied open-source technology as it relates to accessibility and human–computer interaction, and plans to continue this work in his graduate studies.

Hunter Rudnet, Huntington 100

For Rudnet, who buttressed his computer science major with a minor in business administration, a litany of different co-op roles was the perfect path to chart outside the classroom. Whether he was working for a household name like The Walt Disney Company, finance and consulting firms like Stripe or Boston Consulting Group, or a straight-ahead software company like Datadog, he tackled a wide variety of projects, from staff onboarding to security work to software engineering.

When he wasn’t propelling someone else’s business, Rudnet was founding his own in 2018. ShoeHunters LLC, an online community powered by Rudnet’s Python- and Go-based software, allowed sneaker and streetwear enthusiasts to monitor limited-edition goods. Within the business’ first few years, those enthusiasts had collectively made over $1 million.

Outside the business sphere, Rudnet served as a TA for “Fundamentals of Computer Science 1” and “Object-Oriented Design,” mentored Khoury students in their co-op searches, and fundraised through Northeastern Greek life. After graduation, he’ll work as a full-time software engineer for his former co-op employer Stripe in New York City.

Aarshiya Sachdeva, Huntington 100

Aarshiya Sachdeva’s Northeastern resume is a resounding reflection of her data science and business degree. She’s been involved in TAMID at Northeastern, DATA Initiative Lab, Husky Ambassadors, IDEA, and the Khoury Student Advisory Board, and has TA’d for “Discrete Structures,” “Innovation,” and Khoury College’s “Professional Development for Co-op.” Outside of the classroom, Sachdeva worked as a model development co-op for Credit Suisse HOLT and as a technical project management and analytics co-op at Wayfair.

After singing the national anthem at Northeastern’s undergraduate commencement ceremony, Sachdeva plans to travel throughout Europe and Southeast Asia.

Sara Takhim, Huntington 100

Sara Takhim’s passion for community service in tech began during high school, when she co-founded an extracurricular computer science learning program for children with disabilities. In college, she took that passion to Northeastern University Women in Technology (NUWIT), where, as president, she bridged the gap between the club and tech industry leaders.

“We created a packet we provided to any companies we worked with, where they could get a glimpse [of the club’s members] through a resume book,” she said. “And then in exchange, they’d sponsor the club, either monetarily or by providing us with tech talks and workshops throughout the school year.”

READ: From cybersecurity co-ops to women in tech, Sara Takhim makes her mark

This past year, Takhim served as the co-head of operations at Kaleidoscope, the council that coordinates with and advises Khoury College’s student clubs. There, she built on her work with NUWIT by helping other Khoury-based clubs establish connections with local companies and programming initiatives.

Upon graduating, Takhim will start as a full-time cybersecurity consultant on the same IBM team she worked for during her two co-ops. And as she establishes herself in the industry, she will look to continue her community service.

“I started out when I was pretty young, so I know how difficult it can be to navigate this space,” Takhim said. “I’d love to be like a mentor to younger children who are looking to get into tech or security.”

Spencer Belsky, Lux. Veritas. Virtus.

Spencer Belsky began his time at Northeastern rather unconventionally. While many of his peers took classes in person, Belsky was skiing professionally — representing the United States in competitions at home and abroad, rising to a peak national ranking of seventh, and taking classes remotely in the College of Professional Studies.

When injuries and the pandemic brought a close to his competitive skiing career, Belsky enrolled in in-person classes, completed his bachelor’s in information technology, and jumped to Khoury College’s Align program to begin his studies in computer sciences. Along the way, he assumed leadership positions within AEPi and TAMID at Northeastern, worked as a software engineering intern in Israel, and served as a product management co-op at Bevi.

After graduation, Belsky will move to New York City, where he’ll work for Meta as a rotational product manager.

Tom Henehan, Lux. Veritas. Virtus.

Throughout his time as a data science master’s student, Tom Henehan made it his mission to assist others, whether as a research assistant with local labs or a teaching assistant on campus. He also volunteered as a math tutor for multiple organizations and founded a nonprofit that specialized in delivering dental supplies to unhoused people.

In addition, he took part in Khoury College’s apprenticeship program under Ravi Sundaram. There, Henehan explored the ties between mergers and acquisitions, patents, globalization, and green energy, and developed a model for companies to determine whether an acquisition makes strategic sense.

After commencement, Henehan plans to research AI and machine learning for the Air Force Research Laboratory.

Annie Pates, Lux. Veritas. Virtus.

Among a handful of experiences during her time as a computer science student in the Align program, including a software engineering internship with Mercedes-Benz, Annie Pates made her mark as an ambassador for Rewriting the Code. The organization, which strives to empower and support women in tech, made Khoury College its first collegiate partner last year, and relies on ambassadors to recruit, welcome, and support its members.

“It was the first place I had ever been since I started in computer science where I felt like I could be wholly myself in the room,” Pates says. “And that’s what I want when I’m talking to people about RTC — for it to be a place where they can bring their whole selves.”

READ: Northeastern’s Rewriting the Code ambassadors share their stories

Shagun Saboo, Lux. Veritas. Virtus.

Shagun Saboo spent her master’s studies at Khoury College fusing data science with health care and business, primarily through a series of partnerships with faculty.

First came a research assistantship under Khoury–Bouvé professor Stephen Intille in his mHealth Research Group, where Saboo helped develop a pioneering sensor to monitor abiotic room parameters, analyze the sleep patterns of children, and provide insights into pediatric health. Then there was her apprenticeship with Divya Chaudhary, in which she worked on an AI-based form verification system. Finally, there was her work with D’Amore McKim’s Paula Caligiuri on advances in international business and marketing.

Outside of these roles, Saboo served as a TA for data science and machine learning courses under Ehsan Elhamifar, as a co-op for Fidelity Investments and Amazon, and as president of the Khoury Master’s Student Council, where she honed her leadership skills and earned a Student Life Award.

Going forward, Saboo will continue her research with Chaudhary on leveraging AI to treat autoimmune disorders; she’ll also seek full-time opportunities in the finance and health sectors.

Manikhanta Praphul Samavedam, Lux. Veritas. Virtus.

For Manikhanta Praphul Samavedam, the name of the game has been, and will continue to be, leveraging AI in practical ways. It explains not only his choice of a master’s degree in AI, but also his co-op at the data science startup Sway AI and his forthcoming AI research within the Khoury College’s apprenticeship program. He wants his post-commencement job to explore similar ground, and to allow him to push the field’s boundaries with innovative solutions.

Outside of the classroom, Samavedam involved himself with numerous student groups, including the Khoury Master’s Student Council, Graduate Student Governance, NU Sanskriti, and the Google Developer Student Club.

Daniel Bi, Lux. Veritas. Virtus.

During his time at Khoury College, Daniel Bi worked as an admin and event assistant, which allowed him to participate in numerous events and meet many students on the Seattle campus. Outside of work, he is an avid traveler, chef, gamer, and fitness enthusiast.

After graduation, Bi will join Amazon as a software engineer. He previously interned for the company in 2023.

Niyati Khandelwal, Lux. Veritas. Virtus.

Niyati Khandelwal began her master’s studies in Seattle with full stack software engineering experience, and with the goal of absorbing AI and machine learning concepts to expand her professional options. She leaves after navigating not only challenging courses, but also formative internships at Lumen Technology and Tesla, glimpsing the end-to-end car manufacturing process in the latter.

On campus, Khandelwal participated in a product development hackathon as part of a Khoury-sponsored team. She also became a Seattle campus ambassador for Rewriting the Code, an organization which helps women in computer science to network with each other and employers, and which provides students and early-career tech professionals with mentorship and networking opportunities. She was grateful to see people like her climbing the tech ladder and hopes to continue giving back.

After graduation, Khandelwal will be a full-time software engineer for Tesla’s internal applications team in California.

Peiying Li, Lux. Veritas. Virtus.

Peiying Li is a Khoury College Double Husky, having jumped from her bachelor’s in data science to a master’s in computer science at the Seattle campus. After serving on the executive board of Northeastern’s Healthcare Innovation Core for two years as an undergraduate, she spent her graduate years involved with the Seattle campus’s Women in Tech group, eventually becoming the group’s president. She also completed a co-op as a data engineer at sleep fitness company Eight Sleep, where she continued to combine her health care and tech passions.

After graduation, Li plans to pursue software engineering and hone her developer skills, with an eye toward entrepreneurship and innovative health care software.

LeAnn Mendoza, Lux. Veritas. Virtus.

As a member of Khoury College’s inaugural Align data science master’s cohort in Silicon Valley, LeAnn Mendoza spent the last few years building and deepening the community around her.

When she wasn’t serving as a student ambassador, career peer advisor, or teaching assistant, she was founding and chairing the campus’ chapter of the ACM-W, in which students support, celebrate, and advocate for women in computing. Mendoza also helped found the Multimedia Information AI Research Group Lab in Silicon Valley, and researched ways to democratize access to AI technology in K–12 education and entrepreneurship.

And she wrapped it all up with a message for her fellow graduates at Khoury College’s commencement celebration:

Diego Rivera, NSF Graduate Research Fellowship

Diego Rivera has always been fascinated with rearranging the flow and combination of things, which spurred him to leverage scalable algorithms and graph analysis to boost network resilience, particularly as applied to supply chain disruptions. After growing up in Puerto Rico, where hurricanes often cause this sort of disruption, he feels he can bring a unique perspective to the field.

Apart from his new NSF fellowship, Rivera is also a Khoury Distinguished Research Fellow. He previously worked in transportation, insurance, finance, and healthcare analytics.

Sabra Sisler, NSF Graduate Research Fellowship

Unlike most of her fellow honorees, Sabra Sisler graduated from Northeastern last year, doing so with a bachelor’s in computer science and behavioral neuroscience. Along the way, she explored the intersection of those two fields, namely through her co-ops at Merck Research Laboratories, Globus Medical, and Neuraville, a neurorobotic startup. She was also a LSSURP Fellow at the University of Minnesota’s neuroscience department in the summer of 2019.

In the past year, Sisler has delved into post-baccalaureate work on human motor learning under the mentorship of Dagmar Sternad, laying the groundwork for her future research. Alongside Deniz Erdogmus, she also developed EEG-based decoders to control computer interfaces, highlighting the noninvasive potential of brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) in aiding communication for patients with locked-in syndrome.

Sisler will begin her bioengineering doctorate at Stanford University in the fall, with the goal of developing BCIs that decode the neural bases of motor learning and restore motor function in people with neurological impairments.

Neel Sortur, NSF Graduate Research Fellowship

Neel Sortur got plenty of research experience during his undergraduate years at Northeastern, beginning with a research assistantship in Northeastern’s Helping Hands Lab, where he worked on machine learning and robotic automation projects. He then led a project of his own at the Geometric Learning Lab, in which he improved machine-learning-based drag modeling to help satellites avoid colliding with one another. Now he’s algorithmically generating shapes from radar observations at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory. Along the way, Sortur has also served as a technical consultant with TAMID at Northeastern and as the propulsion software lead for AerospaceNU.

READ: Neel Sortur presents satellite research at NeurIPS Conference

With his NSF fellowship in hand, Sortur will pursue a research-based master’s degree at Northeastern, and will continue his work on physics-informed, robust machine learning.

Maxwell Pirtle, Fulbright Scholarship

Maxwell Pirtle’s Husky years, particularly the last two, were marked by a healthy helping of globetrotting.

He began in 2022 with an iOS development co-op for Ginger Labs in San Francisco, where he integrated features for the company’s flagship note-taking app Notability. While there, he also researched formal verification and model checking with Gene Cooperman.

In 2023, Pirtle self-developed a co-op at the IRISA Lab in Rennes, France, where he worked on the SimGrid model check, attended public talks and cultural festivals, and indulged his love of the outdoors by traveling extensively around France. From there, he jumped to a similarly self-developed study abroad at the University of Oslo’s International Summer School, where he spent six weeks learning Norwegian with other international students. And during his final semester at Northeastern, Pirtle traveled to Bangkok on a spring break trip for a business course — where he learned through cultural events and interactions with Thai businesses — before flying to Sweden to present his programming research.

After graduation, and backed by his Fulbright Scholarship, Pirtle will return to France to pursue his computer science master’s degree at the École Normale Supérieure de Rennes.

Neeti Desai, Sears B. Condit Award

Computer science and behavioral neuroscience major Neeti Desai has built her Northeastern journey around two pillars: the intersection of tech and neuroscience, plus the use of tech for social good.

For the former, she works as a research assistant in the Movement Neuroscience Laboratory, where she helps with data processing and visualization. Her co-ops have seen her build electronic ink panels at E Ink Corporation and test AI models and datasets at MORSE Corp.

She has also worked as a Husky Ambassador and the editorial director of Spoon Magazine.

For the latter, Desai is a software developer at Code4Community, a student group that develops software solutions for local nonprofits. There, she has worked to build an HR management system for a nonprofit that helps unhoused young adults find employment.

After graduation, she plans to work in machine learning.

Diptendu Kar, Outstanding Graduate Student Award in Teaching

Diptendu Kar’s journey to cybersecurity was kickstarted after he found his hard drive unexpectedly wiped. After some research into how to retrieve his data, he was on his way.

The teaching award recognizes not just Kar’s TA work, but also CasualCTF, the capture the flag competition he organized for them. Kar had participated in more than 70 CTFs, in which teams engage in challenges, such as finding hidden text strings in intentionally vulnerable systems, breaking into websites, or identifying software vulnerabilities. These competitions have long been a popular method for testing technical knowledge and building problem-solving skills, and Kar says he’d like to see future students continue what he started.

READ: Cybersecurity games: Diptendu Kar’s capture the flag journey