Computer science students and faculty who received departmental honors were recognized at the annual Computer Science Department Awards Ceremony on Wednesday, April 29. This year’s ceremony took place in conjunction with the yearly OlympiCS event, co-hosted by Women in Computer Science at Johns Hopkins and the Johns Hopkins Chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery (JHU ACM).
In recognition of their outstanding contributions as teaching assistants, fourth-year undergraduates Timothy Lin and Mohammed Siam received this year’s Neuhauser Family Undergraduate Teaching Awards in Honor of Dr. S. Rao Kosaraju. Associate Professor Michael Dinitz called Lin “an outstanding head course assistant” who outperformed even the assigned graduate teaching assistant, while Joshua J. Reiter, a senior lecturer in the department, praised Siam’s maturity, positive “can-do” attitude, and passion for helping others.
Second-year undergraduates Nathan Breslow and Edward Xie both received Michael J. Muuss Research Awards, established in honor of the late 1979 Hopkins graduate of the same name. The students were recognized for their application of computer science research to real-world practice—Breslow for his rapid progress and insightful contributions that led to a publication in Transactions on Machine Learning Research and Xie for his collaboration on a project connecting machine learning and surgical robots, now under submission at the International Conference on Intelligent Robotics and Systems.
From left to right: Anvii Mishra, Timothy Lin, Alp Eren Demirtas, Mohammed Siam, and Shang “Shawn” Gao.
Outstanding Senior Awards were given to Anvii Mishra and Suyu Ye in acknowledgment of their academic excellence, leadership, and service. Mishra was applauded in particular for her work on DevMinds, an AI-powered mental health platform that has garnered over $50,000 through various competitions and accelerators, while Ye was recognized for his notable contributions to the fields of social intelligence and multi-agent AI, resulting in publications and honors at top AI conferences and a summer internship at Honda Research Institute.
Three Special Service Awards were bestowed this year to students who have performed outstanding work to benefit the Department of Computer Science, the university, and the community: senior Shawn Guo and juniors Steven Tan and Spencer Ye. Guo was instrumental in establishing the Hopkins Game Dev Society, while Tan and Ye were recognized for their contributions to Johns Hopkins through their competitive programming achievements and leadership of the JHU ACM, respectively.
Senior Alp Demirtas and junior Haojun Shi were presented with 2026 CS+X Awards for their outstanding achievements in combining diverse studies with computer science, double majoring in biomedical engineering and applied mathematics and statistics, respectively.
Finally, Senuka Abeysinghe was selected by his peers for the 2025 Most Valuable Peer Award in recognition of his contributions to the undergraduate CS community and overall departmental spirit. The second-year undergraduate was praised by his fellow students for his constant unconditional support of and willingness to assist his peers, for helping to “make game and mixed-reality development a serious academic discipline at Hopkins,” and for his exceptional desire to learn, dedicated work ethic, and “active engagement in pioneering research outside his career field.”