2019 Outstanding Graduate Student Award Winners
The School of Information Awards Committee is proud to announce the Outstanding Graduate Student Awards in recognition of their excellence and inspiration to other students in our program. The recipients of these awards are Zuleima Cota, Enrique Noriega, Farig Sadeque, Gretchen Stahlman and Louis Migliazza. Congratulations!
Zuleima Cota
Zuleima Cota is graduating with a Master of Science degree in Information. She is interested in human computer interaction and her work focuses on user experience and interface design.
During her time in the program, she has had the opportunity to work with the User Experience team at the UA Libraries helping with various initiatives including as an organizer for the UX@UA meetup group. She has helped run user-studies with School of Information faculty and served as the communication manager for the Library and Information Student Organization (LISO).
Enrique Noriega
Enrique is a PhD candidate at the University of Arizona’s School of Information. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Information Technology and a master’s degree in Computer Science. His current research explores how to leverage reinforcement learning and supervised learning in different natural language processing applications. Enrique is interested in the areas where computational sciences and applied mathematics intersect to provide solutions to real-world problems and strongly believes that society can improve as a whole by embracing the benefits of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Outside the academia, he has spent several years designing, building and deploying software for enterprises in Mexico and the United States. When he has time, he enjoys watching a good movie, playing a challenging video game or drinking a good cup of coffee.
Farig Sadeque
Farig Sadeque is a Spring 2019 School of Information PhD candidate. He has been working under the supervision of Dr. Steven Bethard in the field of applied natural language processing and machine learning since 2014. His primary research focus is in user-level behavioral analysis in social media. Farig’s works have been published in a number of reputed venues over the years. His numerous peer-reviewed publications include papers regarding depression detection from social media texts, in which he developed non-sequential and deep learning models for the detection task. He has introduced a performance metric that combines observational latency with standard performance measures to create a more expressive state-of-the-art metric for early depression detection models. He has also published papers on user engagement in health forum based social media, and has been a part of teams that have worked on anxious word usage and prediction of psychological states of social media users. Farig is planning to join the Health NLP research group in Harvard Medical School after his graduation, where he will work with Dr. Timothy Miller on learning universal patient representation and automated domain adaptation in clinical text. In his spare time, Farig enjoys reading books, drawing cartoons and watching movies. He loves soccer and is an avid Manchester United fan.
Gretchen Stahlman
Gretchen Stahlman is a Ph.D. candidate in the University of Arizona’s School of Information. She holds a Master of Science degree in Library Science from Clarion University of Pennsylvania, and she previously worked as a documentation specialist for the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array telescope project. As a doctoral student, Gretchen served as a Research Development Fellow in the University of Arizona’s Office for Research, Discovery and Innovation during the 2015-16 academic year. More recently, Gretchen was selected as a 2018 LEADS Fellow through the IMLS-funded LEADS-4-NDP program. Gretchen’s research interests include data curation and scholarly communication, and her dissertation project focuses on identifying and characterizing data associated with journal articles in astronomy. In September 2019, Gretchen will join the faculty of Rutgers’ School of Communication and Information as an Assistant Professor in the Library and Information Science (LIS) Department.
Louis Migliazza
Louis grew up in Tucson, AZ and is proud to have received both his Bachelor's in Music and Master's in Library and Information Science from the University of Arizona. He was the president of the ALA student chapter at the U of A from 2018 to 2019. He is currently pursuing a career in public librarianship.