2025 Awards
2025 Awards
2025 CS Awards
The Computer Science department periodically issues department awards for our most accomplished students. Here are the students who have won awards for the Spring 2025 Semester, and a short description of their accomplishments.
CS Medallion Award : Sean Jerzewski
Sean Jerzewski exemplifies the highest standard of academic excellence with the 2025 Computer Science Nhan Huynh Medallion Award. Additionally, he has served as a CS Learning Assistant and Tutor along with contributing as a Teaching Assistant for summer sections of Rowan ASRC Federal Mission Solutions courses. He has been a member of ACM since Fall 2021 and was also inducted into Upsilon Pi Epsilon Honor Society in 2024. Sean is graduating with Honors as he continues his studies in the Combined Advanced Degree Program in CS and will then plan to start his career in Software or High-Performance Computing Engineering.
Dean's Outstanding Senior Award (DOSA): Alexa Gonzalez
Alexa Gonzalez is graduating with her BA in Computing & Informatics with Honors, minor in CS, and CUGS in Spanish. She has contributed to the Rowan community as President of ACM-W, Treasurer of Rowan Circle K International, founding member and Treasurer of Hammocking Club, manager of Rowan’s NCAA Women’s Lacrosse Team, and Blast Mentor for the Honors College. Her achievements include Rowan Scholars, an Outstanding Treasurer Award, and the Bronze, Silver and Gold Certificates with Leadership Rowan. She also completed a CS co-op with Tabernacle School District. Alexa plans to pursue an MBA with concentrations in Data Analytics and Management.
Dean's Outstanding Senior Award (DOSA): Julius Leone
Julius Leone is completing his BA in Computing & Informatics with Honors and a minor in CS. He serves as a CS Tutor and as Vice President of Upsilon Pi Epsilon Honor Society - where he leads the LeetCode presentations every week. As the Web Team Manager, he coordinates development of several projects for CS and CSM including a course scheduler and a research logging/symposium planning application. He has been featured as a speaker for ACM and routinely contributes at Freshman Orientation. After finishing his CS co-op at RunSignup, he accepted an offer to return post-graduation as a full-stack developer.
CS Outstanding Senior Award (CS OSA): Ayden Chance
Ayden Chance will graduate from Rowan University with his BS in Computer Science. He has earned the President’s Scholar of Excellence every semester since transferring to Rowan in Fall of 2023 and has achieved the AWS Solutions Architect Certification in November 2024. He has also given back to the Department of Computer Science by serving as a Learning Assistant. After starting as an IT Intern at Subaru of America in May 2024, he was then converted early to a full-time Software Engineer in February 2025 and will continue working post-graduation in hopes of contributing greatly to Subaru of America’s technology.
CS Outstanding Senior Award (CS OSA): Jasmine Santiago
Jasmine Santiago is graduating with her BS in Computer Science. She is the Co-Secretary/Co-Senator for the Upsilon Pi Epsilon Honor Society and the DEI Coordinator for the Association for Computing Machinery – Women in Computing (ACM-W). Contributing to Rowan’s Academic Support Program, she has also helped other students as a Success Coach. She has previously served as a CS Learning Assistant, placed 2nd at the 2024 ICPC Mid-Atlantic Regionals as part of Rowan Green, and worked as a Software Engineering Intern for Nordstrom. After graduation, she plans to continue to solve people problems while pursuing a career in Software Engineering.
CS Outstanding Graduate Award (CS OGA): Izhar Ali
Izhar Ali will complete his MS in Data Science as part of the CADP. His research with Dr. Shen-Shyang Ho on anomaly detection resulted in a conference paper currently under review. He has collaborated with peers and submitted two papers on split computation offloading via cooperative inference. He was honored with UPE’s highest Dan Drew Award presented to the most outstanding applicant in 2024 and has contributed to development of cybersecurity engineering programs at the University of San Diego. As co-founder of Adversys (short for Adversarial Systems), he leads efforts to automate manual cybersecurity and is licensing to potential customers.
CS Outstanding Graduate Award (CS OGA): Yagna Veera Narayan Kaasaragadda
Yagna Kaasaragadda is completing his MS in Data Science as a CS Graduate Teaching Fellow. His thesis work is on generating audio and radio signals using deep learning models and has developed projects involving AI-driven compression techniques for radio signals and generating synthetic RF signals for data augmentation. He has contributed to Dr. Silvija Kokalj-Filipovic’s research with 3 IEEE publications on Can We Learn to Compress RF Signals?, Deep-Learned Compression for Radio-Frequency Signal Classification, and ReFormer: Generating Radio Fakes for Data Augmentation. In the future, he hopes to work on brain-computer interfaces by leveraging AI, signal processing, and deep learning.
