Computer science and biomedical engineering projects take top honors in 2018 Dean’s Undergraduate Research Symposium

Ph.D. student Ethan Lotz; Ram Gupta, Ph.D., and Dean Barbara D. Boyan, Ph.D., with the Dean’s Undergraduate Research Symposium student researchers.
Ph.D. student Ethan Lotz; Ram Gupta, Ph.D., and Dean Barbara D. Boyan, Ph.D., with the Dean’s Undergraduate Research Symposium student researchers.

Year-long undergraduate research projects were presented in East Hall’s Qimonda Atrium Nov. 20, 2018, at the Dean's Undergraduate Research Symposium. (See photos.) The symposium was open to undergraduate researchers from the VCU College of Engineering, including Dean’s Undergraduate Research Initiative (DURI) scholars. Engineering faculty judged the 29 research posters on display and presented awards to the top three projects:

First Place

DURI student Andriy Mulyar

Project: Addressing Local Class Imbalance in Balanced Datasets with Dynamic Impurity Decision Trees

Student Researcher: Andriy Mulyar

Major: Computer Science

Faculty Adviser: Bartosz Krawczyk, Ph.D.

Second Place

Gabrielle Strandquist and Dean Boyan

Project: Metagenomic Sequence Classification through Deep Learning

Student Researcher: Gabrielle Strandquist

Major: Computer Science

Faculty Adviser: Tomasz Arodz, Ph.D.

Third Place

Keerthana Shankar and Dean Boyan

Project: Driving Barrier Formation within Bioengineered Lungs Using Rotational Seeding ECM Coatings

Student Researcher: Keerthana Shankar

Major: Biomedical Engineering

Faculty Adviser: Rebecca L. Heise, Ph.D.