Students

My name is Shailyn Lineberry and I’m an undergraduate student working as a Student Marketing Assistant here at the Ritchie School!

Aiman Gannous joined the Ritchie School of Engineering & Computer Science for his PhD in the Department of Computer Science (CS) in the Spring of 2014. Gannous successfully defended his dissertation this August and is serving as an adjunct faculty member in Fall 2020.

Being a student in these times is hard enough as is, but imagine raising your first child, finishing a PhD in neuro-engineering, and working on getting accepted into Purdue University all in the same breath. For Boris Peñaloza this is his life. Peñaloza is a current PhD candidate from Panamá working under Interim Dean Haluk Ogmen, PhD, at the Ritchie School of Engineering & Computer Science.

From the start of my Master’s program at DU, I already knew what my thesis was going to be on. Having already worked on Dr. Mahoor’s Dream Face team and having developed a passion for robotics in undergrad, I was tasked with building a robot to meet needs of children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), which we called Nyku.

Jun Hao began his journey as a PhD candidate with Professor Wenzhong Gao, PhD, in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering in January 2016. Hao successfully defended his thesis, “Deep Reinforcement Learning for Optimization of Building Energy Control and Management” this August and reflected on his experiences at the Ritchie School of Engineering & Computer Science.

The Ritchie School of Engineering & Computer Science was overjoyed to celebrate virtually with our graduating students on June 12. Faculty, staff, and family members gathered together to honor the achievements of the class of 2020.

In addition to honoring all of the graduating students, the Ritchie School also recognized several students with awards from the school and different departments for work that went above and beyond during their academic career.

Electrical and computer engineering professor Mohammad Mahoor and PhD student Behzad Hasani introduce us to AffectNet, a facial expression recognition database. Their paper on AffectNet won the 2019 IEEE Transactions in Affective Computing Award for most influential paper.

This fall Dr. Peter Laz’s course Design Thinking in the Community tasked Engineering students with becoming problem solvers. Merging design thinking, human centered design, and engineering design concepts with community service and outreach, his students created programs and projects that solve real-world problems.