Markazi receives 2023 Graduate Student Leadership Award

Daniela Markazi

Informatics PhD student Daniela Markazi has been named the doctoral student winner of the 2023 Graduate Student Leadership Award from The Graduate College. The award recognizes two graduate students (one master's and one doctoral) who have exhibited outstanding services that have positively impacted the UIUC campus and wider communities.

Markazi has over a decade of leadership championing diversity in STEM. Highlights of her work include serving as chair of the central Illinois chapter of the National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT) and providing mentoring and coaching to local high school students in areas of coding and robotics. Additionally, Markazi has demonstrated outstanding leadership through her efforts as the student leader of the UIUC Puerto Rico Disaster Relief Program. In this role, she has taken UIUC students on trips to Puerto Rico to engage with different communities and learn about cultural competence. These efforts led to the creation of a new course at UIUC titled "Community-Based Design and Management for Disaster Resilience." The Graduate Student Leadership Award selection committee extended praise to Markazi for "making an impact that will extend years beyond her graduation." 

Updated on
Backto the news archive

Related News

Wei receives Amazon Post Internship Fellowship

PhD student Tianxin Wei has been awarded an Amazon Post Internship Fellowship, which will provide $20,000 in unrestricted funds and $20,000 in Amazon Web Services (AWS) credits to support Wei's research with his advisor, Professor Jingrui He. For the past two summers, Wei has served as an applied scientist intern at Amazon in Palo Alto, California. He has been part of a team that is working on search query understanding within Amazon apps and services, as well as developing shopping foundation models.

Tianxin Wei

iSchool participation in iConference 2025

The following iSchool faculty and students will participate in iConference 2025, which will be held virtually from March 11-14 and physically from March 18-22 in Bloomington, Indiana. The theme of this year's conference is "Living in an AI-gorithmic world."

Youth-AI-Safety named a winning team in international hackathon

A team of researchers from the SALT (Social Computing Systems) Lab has been selected as a winner in an international hackathon hosted by the Berkeley Center for Responsible, Decentralized Intelligence. The LLM Agents MOOC Hackathon brought together over 3,000 students, researchers, and practitioners from 127 countries to build and showcase innovative work in large language model (LLM) agents, grow the AI agent community, and advance LLM agent technology.

Gore honored in Singapore for community service

BSIS student Saloni Gore is passionate about community service, especially projects related to sustainability and social impact. It is this commitment to making a difference that prompted her to start a project to help provide clean water to rural communities in India and led her from Singapore to the iSchool, where she can learn how to use data and technology to benefit the world.

Saloni Gore