RIT doctoral students enhance success trends for Graduate Research Fellowships

Ph.D. students recognized by National Science Foundation two years running

Philip Salvaggio and Erika Mesh

Two graduate students at Rochester Institute of Technology have been awarded Graduate Research Fellowships from the National Science Foundation for their research in the fields of science and engineering—an honor that, according to RIT graduate dean Hector Flores, is mathematically significant.

“Earning Graduate Research Fellowships from the National Science Foundation two years in a row is a significant accomplishment,” says Flores. “The national average for institutions being awarded these honors consecutively is about 15 percent. RIT’s rate of success is 40 percent, which is a testament to the excellence of our doctoral researchers-in-training.”

Erika Mesh, a doctoral student studying computing and information sciences in RIT’s B. Thomas Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences, primarily researches software engineering process improvement for computational software engineering domains. Other research interests include program comprehension, software engineering knowledge management and artificial intelligence as it relates to automated reasoning and decision making for software engineering tasks.

Mesh, from Rochester, N.Y., earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in software engineering at RIT, is a graduate research assistant with RIT’s Laboratory for Environmental Computing and Decision Making, and is an active member of RIT’s Graduate Student Advisory Committee. She also presented the co-authored paper “Scientific Software Process Improvement Decisions: A Proposed Research Strategy” at the International Conference on Software Engineering.

“I am thrilled to have been awarded a fellowship and am very honored that the NSF reviewers believed in my vision for myself and the future of scientific software,” Mesh says. “It’s an amazing program with a real vision for advancing high-level research in this country.” (more)http://www.rit.edu/news/story.php?id=50070&source=enewsletter