Teresa M. Donnellan

The Department of Statistics’ Lily Wang and George Washington University’s Huixia Judy Wang are developing scalable, distributed computing methods to analyze large-scale spatiotemporal datasets. The collaborative research project is funded by the National Science Foundation.  

The Virginia Cyber Navigator Internship Program (VA-CNIP) has equipped students with the skills to strengthen the cybersecurity posture of election infrastructures. As an intern last summer, information technology major Duong Thuy Nguyen helped secure a rural county’s technology for the upcoming presidential election alongside two George Mason peers. 

Fourteen local high school students spent a week in August learning about renewable energy from electrical engineering professor Liling Huang and a host of local energy engineering professionals. At the end of the week, the students presented their work, a model town powered entirely by clean energy.  

Dmitry Oleynik began attending events hosted by George Mason University’s Early Identification Program as an eighth grader. The program, along with early support from his family, helped him develop an interest in engineering.  

Mechanical engineer Jeffrey Moran, whose lab focuses on self-propelled micro- and nanoparticles, has loved outer space since childhood. Now, one of his experiments, exploring aerosol thermophoresis, will be carried out on the International Space Station. 

A group of local rising high school juniors and seniors attended the BioE Buzz Summer Camp hosted by the Department of Bioengineering at George Mason University in June. Throughout the week, campers met students and faculty, received tours of research facilities, and participated in hands-on lab activities. 

In the quest to combat Alzheimer's disease, George Mason professor Abolfazl Safikhani is working with neuroscientists and imaging experts at the University of Washington’s Alzheimer's Disease Research Center (ADRC) to pioneer groundbreaking advancements in biomarker identification. 

In two recent research projects, George Mason statistics professor Abolfazl Safikhani has applied machine learning tools to time series analysis of land use and real estate pricing to help decision-makers in urban planning and real estate.  

IST’s Myeong Lee received a  $150,000 grant from the Virginia Board of People with Disabilities for the Mapping Information Ecology project. “We want to provide information systems strategies, [structural] recommendations, and related policy recommendations to the state. That's our goal," said Lee.  

On March 21, 2024, Break Through Tech Mason hosted "A Day in the Life: Tech Jobs Unveiled," a panel event featuring Jamie Bowers, Site Reliability Engineer at Microsoft; Veeraj Modi, Security Analyst at Microsoft; and Cassandra Rothrauff, Senior Computer Engineer at Booz Allen Hamilton. Each panelist discussed their path in the tech industry as well as advice they would offer students just starting out.