Doctoral student, senior win Excellence in Research awards

A doctoral student and a senior undergraduate at Texas A&M University were chosen as winners of the Vice President for Research: Excellence in Research Award, the Graduate and Professional Student Council and the Division of Research have announced. The award honors one undergraduate and one graduate student for significant research achievements.

The winners were selected from students who were nominated during Student Research Week in late March. The nominees submitted essays describing their research to a panel of judges. Vice President for Research Glen A. Laine said, “The process for making these awards was extensive. The winners demonstrated the excellence of their research through the complexity and originality of their topics, the precision of their research methods, the accuracy of their data, their expertise in the subject area, and their ability to communicate clearly the implications and impacts they anticipate for their field or for the future.”

The graduate student award went to Aashwin Mishra, a doctoral student in the Dwight Look College of Engineering who applies data science and statistical modeling to analyze systems and predict their responses to real-world conditions. His work examines large amounts of data to discover physics-based relationships and to develop statistical models. Mishra previously attended the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi and the Humboldt University of Berlin.

The undergraduate award was presented to Taylor Strange, a biomedical science major in the College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences, from Montgomery, Texas. As a member of the Undergraduate Research Scholars program, Strange helped to develop sustainable, automated enrichment programs for Quaker parakeets. These programs are designed to engage research animals with interactive gaming while also collecting data about their interactions for further study.

Each winner received a $1,000 award funded by the Division of Research.