Meet the Recipients of the 2025 Graduate Student Excellence Awards
The College of Engineering is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2025 Graduate Student Excellence Awards. These awards celebrate the doctoral students who have made outstanding contributions to research, service, safety, and diversity, equity and inclusion.
This year's recipients are Xiwei Xuan, Alita D'Almeida, Emma Bernard and Nushrat Naushin, and Joaquin Mongollan Santianna.
Excellence in Graduate Student Research
Xiwei Xuan, Computer Science
Xuan is a tenacious researcher working at the intersection of computer vision, machine learning and visual analytics. Advised by Distinguished Professor Kwan-Liu Ma, her work focuses on improving the efficiency, reliability and generalizability of AI systems, with the goal of aligning AI more closely with human intelligence. She develops data-centric and human-involved methods to enable robust, interpretable decision-making, spanning both fundamental research and real-world contexts such as model bias mitigation and open-world cognition. These efforts show promise in enhancing data quality and model robustness, making AI models more effective and cheaper to train. Demonstrating the impact and innovation of her work, she has published six first-author papers in leading journals and conferences, including IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics and ECCV, and contributed to multiple patents and federally funded research projects.
Excellence in Graduate Student Service & Leadership
Alita D'Almeida, Biomedical Engineering
Throughout her graduate career, D'Almeida has demonstrated remarkable leadership and a commitment to service at UC Davis and the broader scientific community. She has held multiple student leadership roles within the Biomedical Engineering Student Association, including co-chair of the health, publicity and recruitment committees, and has gone above and beyond to host alumni speakers and lecturers for the Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion speaker series. She has organized workshops on the importance of cultural awareness in labs and classrooms and mentored graduate and undergraduate students as they navigate their program at UC Davis. Beyond campus, in the global engineering community, D'Almeida has been elected to the leadership committee of the prestigious Women in Molecular Imaging Network, where she has made tangible and lasting impacts through event planning and outreach, most notably as chair of the group's social media subcommittee.
Excellence in Graduate Student Safety
Emma Bernard and Nushrat Naushin, Materials Science and Engineering
Bernard and Naushin jointly serve as lab safety coordinators in Associate Professor of Materials Science and Engineering Roopali Kukreja's research group. From issuing proper training to lab users to identifying and proactively addressing issues, and establishing standards of practice for instruments, they are prime examples of a strong commitment to fostering a secure and responsible research environment. Notably, the pair found that an experimental compound, neodymium nickelate, had turned into powder inside a machine used for growing thin films. Bernard and Naushin immediately issued a stop-work order and contacted Kukreja and the department safety coordinator to establish a protocol to remove the powder and clean the system. They worked together to ensure the system was cleaned correctly and to acquire personal protective equipment to keep lab workers safe from potentially hazardous materials.
Excellence in Graduate Student Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
Joaquin Mogollon Santiana, Chemical Engineering
As a member of the Department of Chemical Engineering's Diversity, Equity and Inclusion committee, Mogollon Santiana strives to make his department's environment as inclusive as possible. He is instrumental in organizing the faculty advising program for undergraduate students, including pairing students with mentors and working to build social capital and confidence among underserved students. He, along with peer student member Archan Vyas, identifies and invites speakers to discuss how companies handle diversity, equity and inclusion, gathers and analyzes data to better inform the activities of the committee and actively searches and applies for grants to promote related activities in the department and the college. Mogollan Santiana also participates as a mentor in programs such as E-Search and UC LEADS, and serves as the diversity, equity and inclusion representative for the Graduate Student Organization in chemical engineering and materials science and engineering.
