2025 Data Science Newsletter
Message from the Program Director
Program Spotlights
Alumni Class Notes
Message from the Program Director
A great hello to all of our alumni from the George Washington University Data Science Program. It is my pleasure to report that the program is still growing and expanding at both the graduate and undergraduate levels.
This year we hired three new full-time faculty that will start in fall 2025, Drs. Junjun Yin, Angelica Walker and Sarah Burnett, as well as a new instructional technologist, Tyler Wallett, a 2024 alum of the program, who will be helping us with computing resources.
Finally, I wanted to let you know that I will be stepping down at the end of this academic year after five years of leading the program. The new director will be Dr. Subrata Kundu from the Columbian Colleges of Arts and Sciences Statistics Department.
I wanted to take a moment to congratulate Parv Bhargava, who is the inaugural recipient of the newly created Michael Thacher and Rhonda Rundle Prize for Excellence in Data Science. This prize was created to recognize a student’s scholarly achievement during their data science studies here at GW. Congratulations, Parv!
In the remainder of this newsletter, you’ll read about a few of the exciting things happening in the program, including about recent student publications.
Thank you so much for your support and involvement. Please stay in touch.
Ryan Engstrom
Director, Data Science Program
Program Spotlights
Alumni Share Their Data Science Journeys
This year, we organized two engaging alumni panels—the first in November and the second in March. These virtual panels provide an unparalleled opportunity for our current students to learn from the experiences of our fantastic alumni community. In addition to organizing panels, we started an alumni advice video series. If you are interested in sharing your story—whether by serving on an alumni panel or recording an individual video conversation—please reach out to Melissa Feuer and Dr. Ryan Engstrom. We would love to hear from you.
Recent Student & Alumni Publications
This past year, several current students and recent alumni published papers in academic journals. These articles have covered a wide range of topics, from graph neural networks to hate speech in U.S. politics.
Most notably, Akshay Verma co-authored “How U.S. Presidential elections strengthen global hate networks” in Nature.
We also had several capstone projects published in the journal Neural Computing & Applications, including:
- “A benchmark for graph-based dynamic recommendation systems” by Tyler Wallett and Amir Jafari
- “Leveraging graph-based learning for credit card fraud detection: a comparative study of classical, deep learning and graph-based approaches” by Sunisha Harish, Chirag Lakhanpal and Amir Jafari
- “Multimodal fusion: advancing medical visual question-answering” by Anjali Mudgal, Udbhav Kush, Aditya Kumar and Amir Jafari.
Alumni Class Notes
- Ruth Dinma Akor, MS ’20, is a senior manager, fraud risk analytics at American Express in New York. She is also enrolled in the AI and ML doctorate program at GW.
- Amjad Altuwayjiri, MS ’24, got her dream job at Deloitte!
- Nena Beecham, MS ’24, completed a cross-country move from D.C. to Seattle, hiking in national parks along the way. She also conducted research in collaboration with NASA which was published in the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
- Daqian Dang, MS ’24, started a new position as a data scientist at the Department of Defense. He is grateful for the opportunity to apply his data science knowledge and skills to drive meaningful insights and innovation.
- Alicia Romero Muci, MS ’18, said her experience at GW provided valuable insights and practical applications that continue to contribute to his professional growth.
- Tulasi Thotakura, MS ’25, is a program analyst at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in Washington, D.C., where she collaborates on artificial intelligence discovery projects and develops data-driven solutions to optimize operational processes.
- Anuradha Tidke, MS ’23, is a data scientist at the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, National Institutes of Health. She works with large drug compound datasets, identifying trends and automating processes to support scientific research.