May 2026 Newsletter
What's Inside This Issue
- Important Information
- Faculty Achievements
- Code@Nest
- School of Computing Symposium
- Student Highlight
Important Information
- Commencement — May 1st
Faculty Achievements
Dr. Anirban Ghosh’s paper, “Constructing Doppelgängers of Greedy Geometric Spanners in Practice,” has been accepted to the 42nd International Symposium on Computational Geometry. Congratulations!
Congratulations to Dr. Xudong Liu for being selected as one of the recipients for the Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award for 2025-2026.
Dr. Upulee Kanewala has been awarded the FIS Distinguished Professorship for 2026-2028. The support will allow Dr. Kanewala’s research team to advance LLM-driven innovations across domains such as scientific software evolution and conceptual learning in STEM. Congratulations!
Dr. Iman Vakilinia has been invited to participate in the Faculty Development Institute on AI in Cybersecurity, hosted by the George Washington University in Washington, D.C., this summer. The program is supported by the National Science Foundation. Dr. Vakilinia’s application stood out from a highly competitive pool, and we are certain he will take full advantage of this opportunity. Congratulations!
Congratulations to Johnathan O’Berry for being recognized by the UNF Graduate School on the quality of his abstract and presentation.
Congratulations to Dr. Indika Kahanda on being awarded the 2026 Undergraduate Research Mentor of the Year at the UNF Student Research Symposium.
Code@Nest
Thank you to FIS for sponsoring Code@Nest.
First Place: Glorious Programmers
Sebastian Suarez, Zainab Hamdani and Said Ulfati
Second Place: Monadic Nomads
Ary Sharifai, Krithick Saravana and Samarah Anido
Third Place: KKJ
Kai Rainy, Jonah Sinclair and Kalianne Mercado
School of Computing Symposium
- Oral Presentation Winner: Jonathan O’Berry, “Improving Robustness of Large Language Models Used in Healthcare Through Prompt Engineering”
- Poster Faculty/Staff Choice: Caden Wondell, Eric Good and Nicholas Lopes, “Design and Development of an Accessible Dental Provider Search Platform”
- Poster Faculty/Staff Choice: Christian Rios, Kemuel Dorset and Anthony Noschese, “Sight-Reading Practice Application”
- Poster Computing Advisory Board Choice: Landon Boner, Olivia Chrisley and Mark Mollison, “Repository Health Dashboard”
- Poster Session A Audience Choice: Brennan Pemberton, Daniel Reinecke and Olivia Chrisley, “Labrys: Circuit Language”
- Poster Session B Audience Choice: Gabriel Osborn and Henry Perry, “CUBECODE COMPILER”
Student Highlight
Alex Carpenter is an Information Technology student and is graduating in Spring 2026 with his bachelor’s degree. He came to UNF in 2023 with his associate degree from Florida SouthWestern State College, with his original plan being to study computer science. After taking classes and receiving guidance from faculty, he realized that Information Technology was a better track for him.
During his time with the School of Computing, he has been an ITS intern assisting with daily technology needs from faculty and staff and has done research with faculty on virtual reality. His favorite class was Cryptography, taught by Dr. Roy, which allowed him to apply the abstract concepts he learned early in his degree.
Carpenter said that the most important thing for a person studying Information Technology to learn is how to communicate well with others and to apply oneself outside of the classroom. Learning how to shake someone’s hand and look them in the eye while also knowing the latest updates in Windows is the duality of being in Information Technology.
After graduation, Carpenter is planning on returning to UNF as a graduate student and is leaning toward getting his master’s degree in Cybersecurity.