Meet the 2024 Khoury College award winners
Mon 05.13.24 / Matty Wasserman
Meet the 2024 Khoury College award winners
Mon 05.13.24 / Matty Wasserman
Meet the 2024 Khoury College award winners
Mon 05.13.24 / Matty Wasserman
Meet the 2024 Khoury College award winners
Mon 05.13.24 / Matty Wasserman
At Khoury College’s commencement celebration, four undergraduate and three graduate students were honored for going above and beyond in research, co-ops, teaching, and community service throughout their time as students.
Following a nomination process, recipients were selected by a committee of administrative staff and advisors from the college. Below, meet the seven outstanding students who were honored for their accomplishments in 2024, or click a name to jump to that point on the page.
- Garrett Michiels
- Nadine AlMuasher
- William Cutler
- Sara Takhim
- Cecilia Lopez
- Zhiyuan (David) Yang
- Chaitanya Gokhale
Garrett Michiels, Undergraduate Co-op Award
Neither of Garrett Michiels’ two co-op experiences went at all according to plan.
For his first co-op in the spring of 2022, Michiels was hired as a DevOps engineer at Wellframe, only for his initial company to be acquired by HealthEdge, a digital healthcare company, one month before he started. The acquisition resulted in a series of layoffs and reorgs, meaning his initial team of six was cut to just three by the end of the co-op, and was assigned a brand-new set of responsibilities.
This past fall, Michiels was hired for his second co-op as a software engineer at Blackberry, a cybersecurity company. Soon after joining, half of his initial team was laid off, and he was reallocated to an interdisciplinary, high-priority team of ten people, where he worked on API and back-end engineering for two yet-to-be-released cybersecurity products.
“I went through the ringer in both experiences, and I feel I came out as a much better employee,” Michiels said. “Seeing people laid off and getting new responsibilities is a challenging experience, but it prepared me for anything that I might see in the future.”
In both instances, the abrupt shifting of his team expanded Michiels’ responsibility — opportunities he ran with. For example, his role at Wellframe revolved around building infrastructure for engineers, and he took initiative to rework the entire onboarding process by restructuring how pipelines loaded data into the new hire database, and how personal environments were reset and rebuilt for new hires and existing engineers.
“My dream is to eventually be a CTO, and you really have to be ready to adjust on the fly and handle anything,” Michiels said. “Maybe it was unconventional, but I was fortunate to get such an exposed version of co-op experiences and see the realities of the working world while still being a student.”
Nadine AlMuasher, Undergraduate Teaching Award
Dating back to the fall of her sophomore year, Nadine AlMuasher has served as a TA every semester, minus those when she was on co-op. And as she became increasingly experienced in teaching Object-Oriented Design (OOD) — a course she ultimately TA’d five times — she took on increased responsibility and influence in shaping the course.
In the summer of 2023, AlMuasher was selected as a head TA for OOD, and helped to redesign homework assignments, labs, and course material in conjunction with Professor Mark Fontenot, all while also helping to oversee other TAs.
“It was a lot of taking initiative, and just being very hands-on with the students,” AlMuasher said. “I had my usual TA responsibilities, like grading and office hours, but then also on the other side, meeting with the professor every week, drafting the material for classes, and keeping in touch with students on a deeper level.”
Throughout her time as a TA, and especially as a lead TA, AlMuasher emphasized the importance of preparation — something she took from her own positive and negative experiences as an OOD student, where TAs could help make or break her succeed.
“That drew me into wanting to be the best TA I could be,” she said. “If there is someone asking for help, I need to be as prepared as possible and put my best effort forward.”
William Cutler, Outstanding Research Award
After arriving at Northeastern as part of the Explore program, a program for undeclared students, 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 co-op in January 2022 was with Amazon Robotics’ resource management team, where he designed and deployed solutions to optimize robots on the Amazon warehouse floors, in addition to debugging the robots’ software systems.
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. Trapped ions are used as fundamental units of information in quantum computing and are studied to build large-scale quantum systems.
“Calibration is a big deal in experimental physics to make sure all your devices are working properly, because if they’re not, then you can’t get an accurate measurement. And that’s what you’re there for,” 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 this fall 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 a suite of 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.”
This fall, Cutler will continue his research at Oxford as he pursues his doctorate there.
Sara Takhim, Undergraduate Community Service Award
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 her passion for community service to Northeastern University Women in Technology (NUWIT), serving as the club’s outreach chair in 2021–22 before taking over as president the following year. While president, she developed the sponsorship prospectus program, in which NUWIT partnered with tech industry leaders to extend opportunities and resources to the club’s 200 members.
READ: From cybersecurity co-ops to women in tech, Sara Takhim makes her mark
“We worked to create 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. And then in exchange, they’d sponsor the club, either monetarily or by providing us with tech talks and workshops throughout the school year,” Takhim said. “That really helped us bridge the gap between the club and the leaders in the technology industry.”
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 efforts.
“Even after college, I just want to continue making a broader impact in terms of helping young people however I can,” Takhim said. “I started out when I was pretty young, so I know how difficult it can be to navigate this space. I’d love to be like a mentor to young younger children who are looking to get into tech or security.”
Cecilia Lopez, Graduate Community Service Award
Throughout her time in Khoury College’s rigorous Align program, Cecilia Lopez had even more on her plate than many of her peers: She also worked a full-time job. While studying for her master’s degree on the Silicon Valley campus, Lopez worked as a content marketing manager for Meta, then transitioned to an AI content writer role for the past year.
Lopez was already feeling the challenge of balancing both sets of demands, which proved overwhelming and isolating at times. But then, after taking on an additional role as a student mentor, she was also tasked with supporting other students facing a similar predicament — and suddenly realized she was far from alone in balancing full-time school and full-time work.
That’s why, in the fall of 2022, she created the Never Enough Timers club, a community group of Align students who work full-time. Students shared their experiences and time management tips with each other while offering support and encouragement.
“I would have loved to be able to only focus on school, but I didn’t have that option because I needed to pay rent and make a living,” Lopez said. “So for us, everything needs to be devoted to avoiding burnout, because the bridge program is really intense to begin with. We are working from 8:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. four days per week at least, and we just try to survive and keep going. It helps to have a community of people with those same challenges.”
Lopez ultimately found great success in Align. In addition to serving as a student ambassador and mentor, she has shared her Align student experience on numerous panels, roundtable discussions, and info sessions, while also sharing her CS journey with student organizations that serve underrepresented populations in CS.
“I was the crazy person who was like, ‘I have a full-time job and full-time school, and I’m going to take on this other part-time job [as an ambassador].’ But I did it, and still do it, because I just believe in the Align program so much. And I love being involved in the local San Jose community — and also the Northeastern community — by attending events, talking to prospective students, and telling them about my experience.”
Zhiyuan (David) Yang, Outstanding Research Award
Zhiyuan (David) Yang’s undergraduate background is in landscape architecture — a field that shares few similarities with CS at first glance, but one that paved the way for his vast research efforts as a master’s student.
Throughout his two years in the Align program, Yang threw himself into research, leading him to work with three different faculty to co-author and publish multiple papers in addition to his capstone study.
“In my journey through landscape architecture, I conducted numerous experiments in VR and AR, and I realized that the field of computer science holds tremendous potential to solve spatial and environmental problems. That realization sparked my interest in conducting research in computer science,” Yang said. “The professors were incredibly supportive, enabling me to explore various avenues during the research process and guiding me towards multiple accomplishments.”
One research piece Yang co-authored explored his interest in global sustainability. In particular, the study addressed the challenge of monitoring global solar energy by proposing a new vision transformer model, which improves the accuracy of solar farm mapping. Additionally, Yang contributed to the creation of the first global dataset of multispectral satellite imagery specifically for solar farms, opening exciting possibilities for renewable energy applications.
For his capstone course, Yang led a team to develop an innovative zero-shot emotion evaluation system for videos using multi-modal methods and large language models, in which the computer model can estimate emotional intensity of video subjects.
“We developed a system where we extract all the features from the video — the sound characteristics, the subtitles, the description of each frame, and the color of each frame,” Yang explained. “And we convert all these features into textual data, feeding them into a large language model. We then allow that model to estimate the emotional intensity of each second of the video. To our knowledge, no one else is researching with a similar approach.”
In addition, Yang helped develop computer vision techniques for remote airport management in Northern Canada, and helped build a computer vision system using drone technology to evaluate forest fire risks.
Chaitanya Gokhale, Graduate Teaching Award
After receiving his undergraduate engineering degree back home in India, Chaitanya Gokhale came to Northeastern in 2022 to earn his master’s degree in hopes of pursuing a career in cybersecurity. But in his time at Northeastern, he’s also discovered another life passion he hopes to incorporate into his future: teaching.
Gokhale took a cybersecurity course in 2022, then TA’d for the class in the spring and fall of 2023. While a student in the course, he felt the impact that dedicated TAs and professors had on his learning experience, and wanted to replicate and expand on that for others.
“During that first semester, I had some really amazing TAs, as well as the professor, who helped me through a lot of my struggles. It immensely inspired me to go on that path and help others,” Gokhale said. “And having taken the class, I truly knew what gaps needed to be filled by a TA and which questions students usually face.”
Gokhale emphasizes the importance of meeting students where they are and making himself accessible in practical, helpful ways. That’s why he made himself available to students on WhatsApp, Microsoft Teams, or via email — whichever they were most comfortable with. On the day before the final paper was due, he was on call nearly around-the-clock to help students as they crammed ahead of the deadline.
“The program has students from so many different technical backgrounds as well as different cultural backgrounds. So, I loved seeing different opinions and ways of thinking on various assignments, and I had to make sure to tailor my help accordingly,” Gokhale said. “It was so gratifying to feel like I was a part of a student’s journey beyond the classroom, and to see them succeed.”
While Gokhale is still lining up a post-graduation job, he said he plans to continue expanding his cybersecurity skills for the next few years before migrating back to a teaching role.
“It isn’t something I always saw myself doing,” Gokhale said. “But after my experience at Northeastern, having a part-time teaching job and eventually coming back to supporting others in some way is something I definitely hope to do.”
At Khoury College’s commencement celebration, four undergraduate and three graduate students were honored for going above and beyond in research, co-ops, teaching, and community service throughout their time as students.
Following a nomination process, recipients were selected by a committee of administrative staff and advisors from the college. Below, meet the seven outstanding students who were honored for their accomplishments in 2024, or click a name to jump to that point on the page.
- Garrett Michiels
- Nadine AlMuasher
- William Cutler
- Sara Takhim
- Cecilia Lopez
- Zhiyuan (David) Yang
- Chaitanya Gokhale
Garrett Michiels, Undergraduate Co-op Award
Neither of Garrett Michiels’ two co-op experiences went at all according to plan.
For his first co-op in the spring of 2022, Michiels was hired as a DevOps engineer at Wellframe, only for his initial company to be acquired by HealthEdge, a digital healthcare company, one month before he started. The acquisition resulted in a series of layoffs and reorgs, meaning his initial team of six was cut to just three by the end of the co-op, and was assigned a brand-new set of responsibilities.
This past fall, Michiels was hired for his second co-op as a software engineer at Blackberry, a cybersecurity company. Soon after joining, half of his initial team was laid off, and he was reallocated to an interdisciplinary, high-priority team of ten people, where he worked on API and back-end engineering for two yet-to-be-released cybersecurity products.
“I went through the ringer in both experiences, and I feel I came out as a much better employee,” Michiels said. “Seeing people laid off and getting new responsibilities is a challenging experience, but it prepared me for anything that I might see in the future.”
In both instances, the abrupt shifting of his team expanded Michiels’ responsibility — opportunities he ran with. For example, his role at Wellframe revolved around building infrastructure for engineers, and he took initiative to rework the entire onboarding process by restructuring how pipelines loaded data into the new hire database, and how personal environments were reset and rebuilt for new hires and existing engineers.
“My dream is to eventually be a CTO, and you really have to be ready to adjust on the fly and handle anything,” Michiels said. “Maybe it was unconventional, but I was fortunate to get such an exposed version of co-op experiences and see the realities of the working world while still being a student.”
Nadine AlMuasher, Undergraduate Teaching Award
Dating back to the fall of her sophomore year, Nadine AlMuasher has served as a TA every semester, minus those when she was on co-op. And as she became increasingly experienced in teaching Object-Oriented Design (OOD) — a course she ultimately TA’d five times — she took on increased responsibility and influence in shaping the course.
In the summer of 2023, AlMuasher was selected as a head TA for OOD, and helped to redesign homework assignments, labs, and course material in conjunction with Professor Mark Fontenot, all while also helping to oversee other TAs.
“It was a lot of taking initiative, and just being very hands-on with the students,” AlMuasher said. “I had my usual TA responsibilities, like grading and office hours, but then also on the other side, meeting with the professor every week, drafting the material for classes, and keeping in touch with students on a deeper level.”
Throughout her time as a TA, and especially as a lead TA, AlMuasher emphasized the importance of preparation — something she took from her own positive and negative experiences as an OOD student, where TAs could help make or break her succeed.
“That drew me into wanting to be the best TA I could be,” she said. “If there is someone asking for help, I need to be as prepared as possible and put my best effort forward.”
William Cutler, Outstanding Research Award
After arriving at Northeastern as part of the Explore program, a program for undeclared students, 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 co-op in January 2022 was with Amazon Robotics’ resource management team, where he designed and deployed solutions to optimize robots on the Amazon warehouse floors, in addition to debugging the robots’ software systems.
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. Trapped ions are used as fundamental units of information in quantum computing and are studied to build large-scale quantum systems.
“Calibration is a big deal in experimental physics to make sure all your devices are working properly, because if they’re not, then you can’t get an accurate measurement. And that’s what you’re there for,” 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 this fall 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 a suite of 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.”
This fall, Cutler will continue his research at Oxford as he pursues his doctorate there.
Sara Takhim, Undergraduate Community Service Award
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 her passion for community service to Northeastern University Women in Technology (NUWIT), serving as the club’s outreach chair in 2021–22 before taking over as president the following year. While president, she developed the sponsorship prospectus program, in which NUWIT partnered with tech industry leaders to extend opportunities and resources to the club’s 200 members.
READ: From cybersecurity co-ops to women in tech, Sara Takhim makes her mark
“We worked to create 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. And then in exchange, they’d sponsor the club, either monetarily or by providing us with tech talks and workshops throughout the school year,” Takhim said. “That really helped us bridge the gap between the club and the leaders in the technology industry.”
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 efforts.
“Even after college, I just want to continue making a broader impact in terms of helping young people however I can,” Takhim said. “I started out when I was pretty young, so I know how difficult it can be to navigate this space. I’d love to be like a mentor to young younger children who are looking to get into tech or security.”
Cecilia Lopez, Graduate Community Service Award
Throughout her time in Khoury College’s rigorous Align program, Cecilia Lopez had even more on her plate than many of her peers: She also worked a full-time job. While studying for her master’s degree on the Silicon Valley campus, Lopez worked as a content marketing manager for Meta, then transitioned to an AI content writer role for the past year.
Lopez was already feeling the challenge of balancing both sets of demands, which proved overwhelming and isolating at times. But then, after taking on an additional role as a student mentor, she was also tasked with supporting other students facing a similar predicament — and suddenly realized she was far from alone in balancing full-time school and full-time work.
That’s why, in the fall of 2022, she created the Never Enough Timers club, a community group of Align students who work full-time. Students shared their experiences and time management tips with each other while offering support and encouragement.
“I would have loved to be able to only focus on school, but I didn’t have that option because I needed to pay rent and make a living,” Lopez said. “So for us, everything needs to be devoted to avoiding burnout, because the bridge program is really intense to begin with. We are working from 8:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. four days per week at least, and we just try to survive and keep going. It helps to have a community of people with those same challenges.”
Lopez ultimately found great success in Align. In addition to serving as a student ambassador and mentor, she has shared her Align student experience on numerous panels, roundtable discussions, and info sessions, while also sharing her CS journey with student organizations that serve underrepresented populations in CS.
“I was the crazy person who was like, ‘I have a full-time job and full-time school, and I’m going to take on this other part-time job [as an ambassador].’ But I did it, and still do it, because I just believe in the Align program so much. And I love being involved in the local San Jose community — and also the Northeastern community — by attending events, talking to prospective students, and telling them about my experience.”
Zhiyuan (David) Yang, Outstanding Research Award
Zhiyuan (David) Yang’s undergraduate background is in landscape architecture — a field that shares few similarities with CS at first glance, but one that paved the way for his vast research efforts as a master’s student.
Throughout his two years in the Align program, Yang threw himself into research, leading him to work with three different faculty to co-author and publish multiple papers in addition to his capstone study.
“In my journey through landscape architecture, I conducted numerous experiments in VR and AR, and I realized that the field of computer science holds tremendous potential to solve spatial and environmental problems. That realization sparked my interest in conducting research in computer science,” Yang said. “The professors were incredibly supportive, enabling me to explore various avenues during the research process and guiding me towards multiple accomplishments.”
One research piece Yang co-authored explored his interest in global sustainability. In particular, the study addressed the challenge of monitoring global solar energy by proposing a new vision transformer model, which improves the accuracy of solar farm mapping. Additionally, Yang contributed to the creation of the first global dataset of multispectral satellite imagery specifically for solar farms, opening exciting possibilities for renewable energy applications.
For his capstone course, Yang led a team to develop an innovative zero-shot emotion evaluation system for videos using multi-modal methods and large language models, in which the computer model can estimate emotional intensity of video subjects.
“We developed a system where we extract all the features from the video — the sound characteristics, the subtitles, the description of each frame, and the color of each frame,” Yang explained. “And we convert all these features into textual data, feeding them into a large language model. We then allow that model to estimate the emotional intensity of each second of the video. To our knowledge, no one else is researching with a similar approach.”
In addition, Yang helped develop computer vision techniques for remote airport management in Northern Canada, and helped build a computer vision system using drone technology to evaluate forest fire risks.
Chaitanya Gokhale, Graduate Teaching Award
After receiving his undergraduate engineering degree back home in India, Chaitanya Gokhale came to Northeastern in 2022 to earn his master’s degree in hopes of pursuing a career in cybersecurity. But in his time at Northeastern, he’s also discovered another life passion he hopes to incorporate into his future: teaching.
Gokhale took a cybersecurity course in 2022, then TA’d for the class in the spring and fall of 2023. While a student in the course, he felt the impact that dedicated TAs and professors had on his learning experience, and wanted to replicate and expand on that for others.
“During that first semester, I had some really amazing TAs, as well as the professor, who helped me through a lot of my struggles. It immensely inspired me to go on that path and help others,” Gokhale said. “And having taken the class, I truly knew what gaps needed to be filled by a TA and which questions students usually face.”
Gokhale emphasizes the importance of meeting students where they are and making himself accessible in practical, helpful ways. That’s why he made himself available to students on WhatsApp, Microsoft Teams, or via email — whichever they were most comfortable with. On the day before the final paper was due, he was on call nearly around-the-clock to help students as they crammed ahead of the deadline.
“The program has students from so many different technical backgrounds as well as different cultural backgrounds. So, I loved seeing different opinions and ways of thinking on various assignments, and I had to make sure to tailor my help accordingly,” Gokhale said. “It was so gratifying to feel like I was a part of a student’s journey beyond the classroom, and to see them succeed.”
While Gokhale is still lining up a post-graduation job, he said he plans to continue expanding his cybersecurity skills for the next few years before migrating back to a teaching role.
“It isn’t something I always saw myself doing,” Gokhale said. “But after my experience at Northeastern, having a part-time teaching job and eventually coming back to supporting others in some way is something I definitely hope to do.”
At Khoury College’s commencement celebration, four undergraduate and three graduate students were honored for going above and beyond in research, co-ops, teaching, and community service throughout their time as students.
Following a nomination process, recipients were selected by a committee of administrative staff and advisors from the college. Below, meet the seven outstanding students who were honored for their accomplishments in 2024, or click a name to jump to that point on the page.
- Garrett Michiels
- Nadine AlMuasher
- William Cutler
- Sara Takhim
- Cecilia Lopez
- Zhiyuan (David) Yang
- Chaitanya Gokhale
Garrett Michiels, Undergraduate Co-op Award
Neither of Garrett Michiels’ two co-op experiences went at all according to plan.
For his first co-op in the spring of 2022, Michiels was hired as a DevOps engineer at Wellframe, only for his initial company to be acquired by HealthEdge, a digital healthcare company, one month before he started. The acquisition resulted in a series of layoffs and reorgs, meaning his initial team of six was cut to just three by the end of the co-op, and was assigned a brand-new set of responsibilities.
This past fall, Michiels was hired for his second co-op as a software engineer at Blackberry, a cybersecurity company. Soon after joining, half of his initial team was laid off, and he was reallocated to an interdisciplinary, high-priority team of ten people, where he worked on API and back-end engineering for two yet-to-be-released cybersecurity products.
“I went through the ringer in both experiences, and I feel I came out as a much better employee,” Michiels said. “Seeing people laid off and getting new responsibilities is a challenging experience, but it prepared me for anything that I might see in the future.”
In both instances, the abrupt shifting of his team expanded Michiels’ responsibility — opportunities he ran with. For example, his role at Wellframe revolved around building infrastructure for engineers, and he took initiative to rework the entire onboarding process by restructuring how pipelines loaded data into the new hire database, and how personal environments were reset and rebuilt for new hires and existing engineers.
“My dream is to eventually be a CTO, and you really have to be ready to adjust on the fly and handle anything,” Michiels said. “Maybe it was unconventional, but I was fortunate to get such an exposed version of co-op experiences and see the realities of the working world while still being a student.”
Nadine AlMuasher, Undergraduate Teaching Award
Dating back to the fall of her sophomore year, Nadine AlMuasher has served as a TA every semester, minus those when she was on co-op. And as she became increasingly experienced in teaching Object-Oriented Design (OOD) — a course she ultimately TA’d five times — she took on increased responsibility and influence in shaping the course.
In the summer of 2023, AlMuasher was selected as a head TA for OOD, and helped to redesign homework assignments, labs, and course material in conjunction with Professor Mark Fontenot, all while also helping to oversee other TAs.
“It was a lot of taking initiative, and just being very hands-on with the students,” AlMuasher said. “I had my usual TA responsibilities, like grading and office hours, but then also on the other side, meeting with the professor every week, drafting the material for classes, and keeping in touch with students on a deeper level.”
Throughout her time as a TA, and especially as a lead TA, AlMuasher emphasized the importance of preparation — something she took from her own positive and negative experiences as an OOD student, where TAs could help make or break her succeed.
“That drew me into wanting to be the best TA I could be,” she said. “If there is someone asking for help, I need to be as prepared as possible and put my best effort forward.”
William Cutler, Outstanding Research Award
After arriving at Northeastern as part of the Explore program, a program for undeclared students, 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 co-op in January 2022 was with Amazon Robotics’ resource management team, where he designed and deployed solutions to optimize robots on the Amazon warehouse floors, in addition to debugging the robots’ software systems.
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. Trapped ions are used as fundamental units of information in quantum computing and are studied to build large-scale quantum systems.
“Calibration is a big deal in experimental physics to make sure all your devices are working properly, because if they’re not, then you can’t get an accurate measurement. And that’s what you’re there for,” 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 this fall 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 a suite of 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.”
This fall, Cutler will continue his research at Oxford as he pursues his doctorate there.
Sara Takhim, Undergraduate Community Service Award
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 her passion for community service to Northeastern University Women in Technology (NUWIT), serving as the club’s outreach chair in 2021–22 before taking over as president the following year. While president, she developed the sponsorship prospectus program, in which NUWIT partnered with tech industry leaders to extend opportunities and resources to the club’s 200 members.
READ: From cybersecurity co-ops to women in tech, Sara Takhim makes her mark
“We worked to create 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. And then in exchange, they’d sponsor the club, either monetarily or by providing us with tech talks and workshops throughout the school year,” Takhim said. “That really helped us bridge the gap between the club and the leaders in the technology industry.”
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 efforts.
“Even after college, I just want to continue making a broader impact in terms of helping young people however I can,” Takhim said. “I started out when I was pretty young, so I know how difficult it can be to navigate this space. I’d love to be like a mentor to young younger children who are looking to get into tech or security.”
Cecilia Lopez, Graduate Community Service Award
Throughout her time in Khoury College’s rigorous Align program, Cecilia Lopez had even more on her plate than many of her peers: She also worked a full-time job. While studying for her master’s degree on the Silicon Valley campus, Lopez worked as a content marketing manager for Meta, then transitioned to an AI content writer role for the past year.
Lopez was already feeling the challenge of balancing both sets of demands, which proved overwhelming and isolating at times. But then, after taking on an additional role as a student mentor, she was also tasked with supporting other students facing a similar predicament — and suddenly realized she was far from alone in balancing full-time school and full-time work.
That’s why, in the fall of 2022, she created the Never Enough Timers club, a community group of Align students who work full-time. Students shared their experiences and time management tips with each other while offering support and encouragement.
“I would have loved to be able to only focus on school, but I didn’t have that option because I needed to pay rent and make a living,” Lopez said. “So for us, everything needs to be devoted to avoiding burnout, because the bridge program is really intense to begin with. We are working from 8:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. four days per week at least, and we just try to survive and keep going. It helps to have a community of people with those same challenges.”
Lopez ultimately found great success in Align. In addition to serving as a student ambassador and mentor, she has shared her Align student experience on numerous panels, roundtable discussions, and info sessions, while also sharing her CS journey with student organizations that serve underrepresented populations in CS.
“I was the crazy person who was like, ‘I have a full-time job and full-time school, and I’m going to take on this other part-time job [as an ambassador].’ But I did it, and still do it, because I just believe in the Align program so much. And I love being involved in the local San Jose community — and also the Northeastern community — by attending events, talking to prospective students, and telling them about my experience.”
Zhiyuan (David) Yang, Outstanding Research Award
Zhiyuan (David) Yang’s undergraduate background is in landscape architecture — a field that shares few similarities with CS at first glance, but one that paved the way for his vast research efforts as a master’s student.
Throughout his two years in the Align program, Yang threw himself into research, leading him to work with three different faculty to co-author and publish multiple papers in addition to his capstone study.
“In my journey through landscape architecture, I conducted numerous experiments in VR and AR, and I realized that the field of computer science holds tremendous potential to solve spatial and environmental problems. That realization sparked my interest in conducting research in computer science,” Yang said. “The professors were incredibly supportive, enabling me to explore various avenues during the research process and guiding me towards multiple accomplishments.”
One research piece Yang co-authored explored his interest in global sustainability. In particular, the study addressed the challenge of monitoring global solar energy by proposing a new vision transformer model, which improves the accuracy of solar farm mapping. Additionally, Yang contributed to the creation of the first global dataset of multispectral satellite imagery specifically for solar farms, opening exciting possibilities for renewable energy applications.
For his capstone course, Yang led a team to develop an innovative zero-shot emotion evaluation system for videos using multi-modal methods and large language models, in which the computer model can estimate emotional intensity of video subjects.
“We developed a system where we extract all the features from the video — the sound characteristics, the subtitles, the description of each frame, and the color of each frame,” Yang explained. “And we convert all these features into textual data, feeding them into a large language model. We then allow that model to estimate the emotional intensity of each second of the video. To our knowledge, no one else is researching with a similar approach.”
In addition, Yang helped develop computer vision techniques for remote airport management in Northern Canada, and helped build a computer vision system using drone technology to evaluate forest fire risks.
Chaitanya Gokhale, Graduate Teaching Award
After receiving his undergraduate engineering degree back home in India, Chaitanya Gokhale came to Northeastern in 2022 to earn his master’s degree in hopes of pursuing a career in cybersecurity. But in his time at Northeastern, he’s also discovered another life passion he hopes to incorporate into his future: teaching.
Gokhale took a cybersecurity course in 2022, then TA’d for the class in the spring and fall of 2023. While a student in the course, he felt the impact that dedicated TAs and professors had on his learning experience, and wanted to replicate and expand on that for others.
“During that first semester, I had some really amazing TAs, as well as the professor, who helped me through a lot of my struggles. It immensely inspired me to go on that path and help others,” Gokhale said. “And having taken the class, I truly knew what gaps needed to be filled by a TA and which questions students usually face.”
Gokhale emphasizes the importance of meeting students where they are and making himself accessible in practical, helpful ways. That’s why he made himself available to students on WhatsApp, Microsoft Teams, or via email — whichever they were most comfortable with. On the day before the final paper was due, he was on call nearly around-the-clock to help students as they crammed ahead of the deadline.
“The program has students from so many different technical backgrounds as well as different cultural backgrounds. So, I loved seeing different opinions and ways of thinking on various assignments, and I had to make sure to tailor my help accordingly,” Gokhale said. “It was so gratifying to feel like I was a part of a student’s journey beyond the classroom, and to see them succeed.”
While Gokhale is still lining up a post-graduation job, he said he plans to continue expanding his cybersecurity skills for the next few years before migrating back to a teaching role.
“It isn’t something I always saw myself doing,” Gokhale said. “But after my experience at Northeastern, having a part-time teaching job and eventually coming back to supporting others in some way is something I definitely hope to do.”
At Khoury College’s commencement celebration, four undergraduate and three graduate students were honored for going above and beyond in research, co-ops, teaching, and community service throughout their time as students.
Following a nomination process, recipients were selected by a committee of administrative staff and advisors from the college. Below, meet the seven outstanding students who were honored for their accomplishments in 2024, or click a name to jump to that point on the page.
- Garrett Michiels
- Nadine AlMuasher
- William Cutler
- Sara Takhim
- Cecilia Lopez
- Zhiyuan (David) Yang
- Chaitanya Gokhale
Garrett Michiels, Undergraduate Co-op Award
Neither of Garrett Michiels’ two co-op experiences went at all according to plan.
For his first co-op in the spring of 2022, Michiels was hired as a DevOps engineer at Wellframe, only for his initial company to be acquired by HealthEdge, a digital healthcare company, one month before he started. The acquisition resulted in a series of layoffs and reorgs, meaning his initial team of six was cut to just three by the end of the co-op, and was assigned a brand-new set of responsibilities.
This past fall, Michiels was hired for his second co-op as a software engineer at Blackberry, a cybersecurity company. Soon after joining, half of his initial team was laid off, and he was reallocated to an interdisciplinary, high-priority team of ten people, where he worked on API and back-end engineering for two yet-to-be-released cybersecurity products.
“I went through the ringer in both experiences, and I feel I came out as a much better employee,” Michiels said. “Seeing people laid off and getting new responsibilities is a challenging experience, but it prepared me for anything that I might see in the future.”
In both instances, the abrupt shifting of his team expanded Michiels’ responsibility — opportunities he ran with. For example, his role at Wellframe revolved around building infrastructure for engineers, and he took initiative to rework the entire onboarding process by restructuring how pipelines loaded data into the new hire database, and how personal environments were reset and rebuilt for new hires and existing engineers.
“My dream is to eventually be a CTO, and you really have to be ready to adjust on the fly and handle anything,” Michiels said. “Maybe it was unconventional, but I was fortunate to get such an exposed version of co-op experiences and see the realities of the working world while still being a student.”
Nadine AlMuasher, Undergraduate Teaching Award
Dating back to the fall of her sophomore year, Nadine AlMuasher has served as a TA every semester, minus those when she was on co-op. And as she became increasingly experienced in teaching Object-Oriented Design (OOD) — a course she ultimately TA’d five times — she took on increased responsibility and influence in shaping the course.
In the summer of 2023, AlMuasher was selected as a head TA for OOD, and helped to redesign homework assignments, labs, and course material in conjunction with Professor Mark Fontenot, all while also helping to oversee other TAs.
“It was a lot of taking initiative, and just being very hands-on with the students,” AlMuasher said. “I had my usual TA responsibilities, like grading and office hours, but then also on the other side, meeting with the professor every week, drafting the material for classes, and keeping in touch with students on a deeper level.”
Throughout her time as a TA, and especially as a lead TA, AlMuasher emphasized the importance of preparation — something she took from her own positive and negative experiences as an OOD student, where TAs could help make or break her succeed.
“That drew me into wanting to be the best TA I could be,” she said. “If there is someone asking for help, I need to be as prepared as possible and put my best effort forward.”
William Cutler, Outstanding Research Award
After arriving at Northeastern as part of the Explore program, a program for undeclared students, 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 co-op in January 2022 was with Amazon Robotics’ resource management team, where he designed and deployed solutions to optimize robots on the Amazon warehouse floors, in addition to debugging the robots’ software systems.
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. Trapped ions are used as fundamental units of information in quantum computing and are studied to build large-scale quantum systems.
“Calibration is a big deal in experimental physics to make sure all your devices are working properly, because if they’re not, then you can’t get an accurate measurement. And that’s what you’re there for,” 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 this fall 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 a suite of 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.”
This fall, Cutler will continue his research at Oxford as he pursues his doctorate there.
Sara Takhim, Undergraduate Community Service Award
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 her passion for community service to Northeastern University Women in Technology (NUWIT), serving as the club’s outreach chair in 2021–22 before taking over as president the following year. While president, she developed the sponsorship prospectus program, in which NUWIT partnered with tech industry leaders to extend opportunities and resources to the club’s 200 members.
READ: From cybersecurity co-ops to women in tech, Sara Takhim makes her mark
“We worked to create 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. And then in exchange, they’d sponsor the club, either monetarily or by providing us with tech talks and workshops throughout the school year,” Takhim said. “That really helped us bridge the gap between the club and the leaders in the technology industry.”
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 efforts.
“Even after college, I just want to continue making a broader impact in terms of helping young people however I can,” Takhim said. “I started out when I was pretty young, so I know how difficult it can be to navigate this space. I’d love to be like a mentor to young younger children who are looking to get into tech or security.”
Cecilia Lopez, Graduate Community Service Award
Throughout her time in Khoury College’s rigorous Align program, Cecilia Lopez had even more on her plate than many of her peers: She also worked a full-time job. While studying for her master’s degree on the Silicon Valley campus, Lopez worked as a content marketing manager for Meta, then transitioned to an AI content writer role for the past year.
Lopez was already feeling the challenge of balancing both sets of demands, which proved overwhelming and isolating at times. But then, after taking on an additional role as a student mentor, she was also tasked with supporting other students facing a similar predicament — and suddenly realized she was far from alone in balancing full-time school and full-time work.
That’s why, in the fall of 2022, she created the Never Enough Timers club, a community group of Align students who work full-time. Students shared their experiences and time management tips with each other while offering support and encouragement.
“I would have loved to be able to only focus on school, but I didn’t have that option because I needed to pay rent and make a living,” Lopez said. “So for us, everything needs to be devoted to avoiding burnout, because the bridge program is really intense to begin with. We are working from 8:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. four days per week at least, and we just try to survive and keep going. It helps to have a community of people with those same challenges.”
Lopez ultimately found great success in Align. In addition to serving as a student ambassador and mentor, she has shared her Align student experience on numerous panels, roundtable discussions, and info sessions, while also sharing her CS journey with student organizations that serve underrepresented populations in CS.
“I was the crazy person who was like, ‘I have a full-time job and full-time school, and I’m going to take on this other part-time job [as an ambassador].’ But I did it, and still do it, because I just believe in the Align program so much. And I love being involved in the local San Jose community — and also the Northeastern community — by attending events, talking to prospective students, and telling them about my experience.”
Zhiyuan (David) Yang, Outstanding Research Award
Zhiyuan (David) Yang’s undergraduate background is in landscape architecture — a field that shares few similarities with CS at first glance, but one that paved the way for his vast research efforts as a master’s student.
Throughout his two years in the Align program, Yang threw himself into research, leading him to work with three different faculty to co-author and publish multiple papers in addition to his capstone study.
“In my journey through landscape architecture, I conducted numerous experiments in VR and AR, and I realized that the field of computer science holds tremendous potential to solve spatial and environmental problems. That realization sparked my interest in conducting research in computer science,” Yang said. “The professors were incredibly supportive, enabling me to explore various avenues during the research process and guiding me towards multiple accomplishments.”
One research piece Yang co-authored explored his interest in global sustainability. In particular, the study addressed the challenge of monitoring global solar energy by proposing a new vision transformer model, which improves the accuracy of solar farm mapping. Additionally, Yang contributed to the creation of the first global dataset of multispectral satellite imagery specifically for solar farms, opening exciting possibilities for renewable energy applications.
For his capstone course, Yang led a team to develop an innovative zero-shot emotion evaluation system for videos using multi-modal methods and large language models, in which the computer model can estimate emotional intensity of video subjects.
“We developed a system where we extract all the features from the video — the sound characteristics, the subtitles, the description of each frame, and the color of each frame,” Yang explained. “And we convert all these features into textual data, feeding them into a large language model. We then allow that model to estimate the emotional intensity of each second of the video. To our knowledge, no one else is researching with a similar approach.”
In addition, Yang helped develop computer vision techniques for remote airport management in Northern Canada, and helped build a computer vision system using drone technology to evaluate forest fire risks.
Chaitanya Gokhale, Graduate Teaching Award
After receiving his undergraduate engineering degree back home in India, Chaitanya Gokhale came to Northeastern in 2022 to earn his master’s degree in hopes of pursuing a career in cybersecurity. But in his time at Northeastern, he’s also discovered another life passion he hopes to incorporate into his future: teaching.
Gokhale took a cybersecurity course in 2022, then TA’d for the class in the spring and fall of 2023. While a student in the course, he felt the impact that dedicated TAs and professors had on his learning experience, and wanted to replicate and expand on that for others.
“During that first semester, I had some really amazing TAs, as well as the professor, who helped me through a lot of my struggles. It immensely inspired me to go on that path and help others,” Gokhale said. “And having taken the class, I truly knew what gaps needed to be filled by a TA and which questions students usually face.”
Gokhale emphasizes the importance of meeting students where they are and making himself accessible in practical, helpful ways. That’s why he made himself available to students on WhatsApp, Microsoft Teams, or via email — whichever they were most comfortable with. On the day before the final paper was due, he was on call nearly around-the-clock to help students as they crammed ahead of the deadline.
“The program has students from so many different technical backgrounds as well as different cultural backgrounds. So, I loved seeing different opinions and ways of thinking on various assignments, and I had to make sure to tailor my help accordingly,” Gokhale said. “It was so gratifying to feel like I was a part of a student’s journey beyond the classroom, and to see them succeed.”
While Gokhale is still lining up a post-graduation job, he said he plans to continue expanding his cybersecurity skills for the next few years before migrating back to a teaching role.
“It isn’t something I always saw myself doing,” Gokhale said. “But after my experience at Northeastern, having a part-time teaching job and eventually coming back to supporting others in some way is something I definitely hope to do.”
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