Manning CICS Students Named 2026 Commencement Speakers
Mansi Maheshwari will speak at the Master’s and Education Specialist Commencement Ceremony while Shhreya Anand will speak at the Undergraduate Commencement Ceremony.
Content
Two Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) students have been selected to represent the Class of 2026 as speakers at separate University of Massachusetts Amherst Commencement ceremonies. Mansi Maheshwari, who is graduating with a master's degree in computer science, will speak at the Master's and Education Specialist Commencement Ceremony on Friday, May 15, at the Mullins Center. Shhreya Anand, who is graduating with dual degrees in computer science and mathematics, will speak at the Undergraduate Commencement Ceremony later that day at McGuirk Alumni Stadium.
Mansi Maheshwari
The first in her extended family to study abroad, Maheshwari earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Washington (UW) and worked for two years as a software engineer in Seattle before beginning her graduate studies.
At UMass, Maheshwari quickly distinguished herself as a scholar. Her first-authored paper was accepted as a poster at the 2025 Conference on Lifelong Learning Agents and then as a full paper and oral presentation at the 2026 International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, a leading international conference in artificial intelligence.
She further distinguished herself as the only student from Manning CICS selected as a finalist for the university’s 2025 Three Minute Thesis competition. In summer 2025, she applied her expertise to the real world by building computer vision systems for autonomous tractors. Passionate about creating pathways into AI for young learners, she also designed and taught a Fundamentals of Artificial Intelligence course for high school students through UW’s Youth & Teen Programs.
After graduation, Maheshwari will pursue a doctorate at Mila – Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, home to the world’s largest academic concentration of deep learning researchers. Her long-term vision is to advance human–AI collaboration and expand access to AI education globally.
Shhreya Anand
Anand earned the Undergraduate Academic Achievement Award and Outstanding Leadership Award in 2025, and she was invited to join the Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi for ranking in the top 10 percent of her class.
As a woman in STEM, Anand has created an inclusive environment for students of all identities, serving as a mentor through the Manning CICS Alumni Mentorship Program and as president of the UMass Amherst Data Science and Machine Learning Club, where she fostered data-driven learning through workshops, datathons, and guest lectures. She has also participated in many hackathons across the country, including the Hack(H)er413 hackathon, with her team winning third in the Mass State Lottery New Game Challenge.
While pursuing her degrees, Anand conducted reinforcement learning research under Professor Bruno Castro da Silva, presenting her work at the Massachusetts Undergraduate Research Conference, and acted as a quantitative researcher with the Minutemen Alternative Investment Fund. She also held several internships, including at Micron, where she worked on optimization problems for vision-language models and published a white paper with her findings, and at Dassault Systèmes on its R&D team.
After Commencement, Anand plans to return to industry, pursuing machine learning research and development work.