CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award Nominees
These CS students were nominated by the Tufts Department of Computer Science faculty for the 2025 Computing Research Association's (CRA) Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award. CRA is one of the leading professional organizations in computer science, and we congratulate all of our nominees for their contributions to research in this field. You can see more about these international awards on the CRA website here.
Klara Chura, A25
Klara Chura has been conducting research at the Multimodal Learning, Interaction, and Perception (MuLIP) Lab led by Prof. Jivko Sinapov since 2022. Her work focuses on training AI to adapt when faced with novel situations or environments. As part of this effort, she contributed to the development of NovelGridWorldsV2 and NovelGym, which allow researchers to test their agents by introducing both pre-defined and custom novelties. She also co-authored the paper “NovelGym: A Flexible Ecosystem for Hybrid Planning and Learning Agents Designed for Open Worlds,” published in the Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems in 2024. Chura received an Honorable Mention from CRA for her award nomination.
Cordelia Ludden, E26
Cordelia Ludden has been a research assistant in the Tufts Security and Privacy Lab under the mentorship of Prof. Daniel Votipka since her freshman year. She began by contributing to a project examining how universities use student directory information in relation to student privacy preferences and the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). Since then, she taken on two major projects. The first investigates the impact of manipulating search engine results, for which she developed two data scraping tools designed to account for various algorithmic manipulations. Preliminary findings were presented at the 2024 Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS), where she and her team received runner-up for the best poster award. Her second project builds on prior research to examine how software developers perceive the security risks of using AI assistants. This work utilized her previous data scraping tools and incorporated interviews conducted by researchers from four other institutions. She earned the best poster award for this research at SOUPS in 2024, and her paper on the on the project was published in the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security in the same year. Ludden was named a Finalist for the CRA Award in recognition of her outstanding research.
Kathy Quintanilla, A25
Katherine Quintanilla has worked in the Tufts Security and Privacy Lab under the mentorship of Prof. Daniel Votipka since 2022. Her work focuses on identifying the challenges students face around privacy and security, including research on the potential risks of privacy gaps in the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). Last year, she received an Honorable Mention from the CRA for her research on FERPA, which was also published in the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Currently, she is leading a project that investigates the challenges of teaching and learning healthy security and privacy habits in low-income schools. Through interviews with educators, she aims to identify gaps and develop policies to better safeguard students from online threats as technology becomes more integral to the classroom. Quintanilla received an Honorable Mention from CRA for her award nomination.
Charlotte Versavel, E25
Charlotte Versavel developed the program ReConnecting Clusters in Protein Embeddings (ReCIPE) under the guidance of Prof. Lenore Cowen. ReCIPE uses algorithms to analyze “connector” proteins in protein-protein interaction networks, addressing a key limitation of previous analyzing methods in which key “connector” proteins were often missed. ReCIPE bridges this gap, enriching the data for biologists studying cellular processes. She presented this work at the 2022 ACM-BCB conference Computational Network Biology workshop in Chicago, the 2023 CAGI Workshop, and RECOMB 2024. Versavel received an Honorable Mention from CRA for her award nomination.
Past CRA nominees:
2024:
Eddy He - Honorable Mention
Kathy Quintanilla - Honorable Mention
Liam Strand - Honorable Mention
2023:
Victoria Chen - Honorable Mention
Madeline McLaughlin
Mary-Joy Sidhom
2022:
Jonathan Conroy - Honorable Mention
Hailey McKelvie
Madeline McLaughlin
Jack Freeman
2021:
Derek Egolf - Honorable Mention
Lauren Labell - Honorable Mention
Jonathan Rodriguez - Finalist
Gian Marco Visani - Honorable Mention
2020:
Samuel Shaw – Finalist
Amel Hassan – Honorable Mention
Oliver Korten – Honorable Mention
Faizan Muhammad – Honorable Mention
2019:
Alexander Bock
Christopher Meierfrankenfeld
Marilyn Sun - Honorable Mention
2018:
Sarah Hall-Swan – Runner Up
2017:
Yisu Remy Wang – Finalist
2016:
Jennifer Hammelman – Honorable Mention (Female)
Tara Kola – Honorable Mention (Female)
Thomas Schaffner – Honorable Mention (Male)
2013:
Gregory Bodwin – Honorable Mention (Male)
Ariel Hamlin
Max Smiley – Honorable Mention (Male)
2012:
Sarah Cannon – Female Awardee
Constantin Berzin – Honorable Mention (Male)
Connor Gramazio – Honorable Mention (Male)
2011:
Mark D. Leiserson – Male Runner-Up
Sarah Cannon – Honorable Mention (Female)
Sean Kelley – Honorable Mention (Male)
2009:
Jessie Berlin – Honorable Mention (Female)
Adam Raczkowski – Honorable Mention (Male)
2007:
Joshua Danziger
Brandon Lucia
Jennifer Tam
2006:
Kathryn Seyboth – Finalist (Female)
2005:
John Hugg – Honorable Mention (Male)