9 CICS PhD Students Receive Spring 2026 Dissertation and Thesis Proposal Writing Fellowships

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Nine doctoral students have received Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) Spring 2026 Dissertation and Thesis Proposal Writing Fellowships, a recognition that highlights the strength of their research and its contributions to computing theory and practice.

Students were nominated by their faculty advisors and each receives a stipend to support the completion of their research and preparation for their defense and graduation. Daniel Marew and Aimen Gaba received the fellowship for both the Fall 2025 and Spring 2026 semesters. 

The 2026 fellowship recipients span research areas such as artificial intelligence, robotics, and other core areas of computing, reflecting a wide range of doctoral scholarship underway at Manning CICS. The Spring 2026 fellows are listed below: 

Image	Mahsa Sahebdel Alamdari Advisor: Mohammad Hajiesmaili TBD
Image	Abhinav Bhatia Advisor: Shlomo Zilberstein “Learning to Think about Thinking: Metareasoning with Deep Reinforcement Learning for Efficient and Safe Decision-Making”
Image	Aimen Gaba Advisor: Cindy Xiong Bearfield "Advancing Responsible and Trustworthy AI Using Human-Centered Methods"
Image	Daniel Marew Advisor: Donghyun Kim "From Trajectory Optimization to Learning: Developing Controllers for Dynamic Legged Robots"
Image	Hunter McNichols Advisor: Andrew Lan "Potentials and Pitfalls of Language Models in Education”
Image	Mohammad Hadi Nezhad Advisor: Ivon Arroyo "Ethical and Socially Responsible Development and Use of Computing Systems"
Image	Nicholas Perello Advisors: Przemyslaw Grabowicz and Yair Zick "Towards Fair and Explainable Artificial Intelligence"
Image	Prasanna Lakkur Subramanyam Advisor: Brian Levine "A Computational Approach to Understanding Online Community Dynamics and Opinion"
Image	Andy Zane Advisor: David Jensen "Causal Tools for Hybrid Dynamical Systems"