Awards and Funding

NSF IUSE: EDU Grant (Engaged Student Learning Track) ($300,000), 2024

With help from my advisors—Gerald Soosairaj and Bill Griswold—I planned and wrote a grant titled Improving Students’ Program Comprehension in Large Code Bases. The three phases of the grant are 1) identifying student struggles related to program comprehension, 2) designing a research-based, scalable curriculum to address those struggles, and 3) evaluating the curriculum on students’ program comprehension strategies and abilities. This grant was an important milestone in my PhD, as I was given the incredible opportunity to design a long-term research project and lead a grant-writing effort, mostly on my own, to secure funding for the project.

UCSD Course Development and Instructional Improvement Program ($50,000), 2023

The Course Development and Instructional Improvement Program (CDIIP) Grant is UCSD-awarded funding “to support faculty projects that enhance undergraduate instruction and to encourage faculty experimenting with new instructional technologies.” I led the planning and writing effort to secure a grant titled Teaching the “hidden curriculum” of software development and creating a supplemental free, digital textbook. Only 10 CDIIP grants were awarded in 2023 (the year which I submitted this grant). The funding allowed me to develop an online textbook hosted on Stepik called “Working with Large Codebases”, which focuses on program comprehension, code management, and AI-assisted development in a large code base. The textbook is free and openly-accessible to all learners.

Denardis Memorial Award, Duke University, 2021

Awarded to the Duke Computer Science senior who exemplifies excellence in service to the department and the community. The award page on the Duke Computer Science website describes that I earned the award “for outstanding contributions and leadership as an undergraduate teaching assistant and Head UTA for Compsci 101 for several years and more recently UTA for CompSci 216, and for contributing toward computer science education research by developing the CS101 Reviewer App to provide students with extra practice on understanding concepts in Compsci 101.”