Dr. Madhav V. Marathe (http://www.vbi.vt.edu/ndssl/people-profile/Madhav-Marathe) has been named Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, for contributions to high performance computing algorithms and software environments. Dr. Marathe is the director of the Network Dynamics and Simulation Science Laboratory (http://www.vbi.vt.edu/ndssl/) in the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute (http://vbi.vt.edu/).
Nicholas Sharp, CS undergraduate student, achieved the level of Finalist in the prestigious 2015 National Computing Research Association Undergraduate Research Award competition (http://www.cra.org/awards/undergrad-current/). His faculty research mentors are Drs. T.M. Murali (https://bioinformatics.cs.vt.edu/~murali/) and Shane Ross (ESM).
The CRA annual undergrad research competition distinguishes candidates by gender and by the type of their home department: non-Ph.D.-granting vs Ph.D.-granting. Nick was in the competition in the male, Ph.D.-granting department group. There were one Winner, one Runner-up and four Finalists selected in this category, as well as seven Honorable Mentions. The home universities for the top six researchers included: University of Washington, Seattle; Columbia; UNC, Chapel Hill; Mississippi State; Texas A&M, and Virginia Tech. The Department is proud of all of its winners in this competition; between 2010 and 2015 we have had four Honorable Mentions and two Finalists!
Parang Saraf, CS Ph.D. student, and teammate Patrick Butler, CS graduate, won the 2014 IEEE VAST Grand Challenge Award for Effective Analysis and Presentation in Paris, France. This award was featured on the COE website ribbon, which can be found at: http://vacommunity.org/VAST+Challenge+2014. Parang works on the EMBERS (http://dac.cs.vt.edu/projects/embers) project with Dr. Naren Ramakrishnan (http://cs.vt.edu/˜ramakris). More information about this award can be found on the NCR website: http://ncr.vt.edu/highlights/Highlight-111914.html