Annual Rosenthal and Brownstein Awards given to PhD students Nivan Ferreira and Samah Saeed

The NYU-Poly Department of Computer Science and Engineering is pleased to announce this year's winners of its two annual departmental awards.

PhD Student Nivan Roberto Ferreira received this year's Deborah Rosenthal, MD Award for outstanding performance in the department's PhD qualifying exam. This award was established by the late Professor Myron M. Rosenthal in the name of his daughter Deborah Rosenthal (Class of 1981, MS in Bioengineering).

Ferreira has a BS in Computer Science and an MS in mathematics from Universidade Federal de Pernambuco in Brazil.  He transferred to NYU-Poly from the PhD program at the University of Utah. Ferreira's research focuses on Information and Scientific Visualization, and he is interested in coupling machine learning and visualization techniques.  He is advised by Prof. Claudio Silva. The results of Ferreira's research, which he presented in his qualifying exam, have appeared in a paper in EuroVis 2013 and in a paper published in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. The EuroVis paper received an Honorable Mention as a best paper (a print version of the paper appeared in Computer Graphics Forum).

Samah Mohammed Saeed received this year's Pearl Brownstein Doctoral Research Award. This award was established by Pearl Brownstein in loving memory of her son, Joseph, to PhD students in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering whose doctoral research shows the greatest promise.

Saeed received a BS and MS from the Dept. of Computer Science at the University of Kuwait.   Her primary field of research is Computer-Aided Design and Reliability of VLSI Circuits, specifically Design-for-Testability. Saeed's research advisor is Prof. Ozgur Sinanoglu of NYU Abu-Dhabi. Saeed's research has appeared in journals such as IEEE Transactions on VLSI and IEEE Design and Test of Computers. She has also published 4 IEEE conference papers. She was the recipient of a Best Paper award at the 2011 VLSI Test Syposium.