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Outstanding Doctoral Student Awards |
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 Pardha Pyla, Ph.D. student of the Computer Science department (left, with president Charles Steger) and Jory Zmuda Ruscio, Ph.D. student of Genetics, Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (right, with  Pardha Pyla) received Outstanding Doctoral Student Awards, presented at the Graduate Awards Banquet on March 29. Each award included a plaque and $500.
Pardha Pyla, recipient of the College of Engineering’s Outstanding Doctoral Student award, is a member of the Center for Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) at Virginia Tech. His research interests include usability engineering, software engineering, human-computer interaction, and computer science education. Furthermore, Pardha Pyla’s dissertation, advised by Dr. Rex Hartson, involves designing and developing a representation framework for integrating usability and software engineering life cycles. This framework provides a development infrastructure within which the usability engineering and software engineering life cycles co-exist in cooperative and complementary roles.
Jory Ruscio, recipient of the Outstanding Doctoral Student award for Interdisciplinary programs, is advised by Dr. Alexey Onufriev of the Computer Science department. Her research focuses in the application of Computational Biology techniques to study the structure and function relationships in protein and DNA at the atomic level.Ruscio has used molecular dynamics to simulate three systems of interest: Determining mechanism and substrate specificity in beta-glucosidases; identifying ligand migration pathways in myoglobin; and quantifying flexibility and structural distortions of DNA packing. Jory Ruscio is also the president of the Graduate Student Assembly at Virginia Tech.
The Computer Science department is proud of the students’ accomplishment, and wishes them continued success in the course of their respective careers! |
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