Fall research grants awarded at DSU

November 18, 2024

Each fall, Dakota State University offers funded research opportunities to undergraduate and graduate students through mentored research initiative programs.

These programs enable students to conduct hands-on research with a faculty mentor and includes a stipend to cover expenses incurred with their projects.

Sixteen undergraduate and seven graduate students were awarded funds to complete their research projects for the 2024-25 academic year.

The students will present their research results in March 2025 at the annual Research Symposium.

The undergraduate winners include:

College of Arts & Sciences

• Basbo Ayelazono and Vanessa Ocansey, mentored by Dr. Kristel Bakker. Project title: “Survey of Wetlands for Microplastics in Lake County, South Dakota.”
• Kylie Borchert, mentored by Dr. Kristel Bakker. Project title: “Does the Use of Audits Decrease the Infection Rate in a Medical Care Setting?”
• Alexander Deak, mentored by Dr. Bill Bendix. Project title: “The Effect of Cyber Systems on Democratic Backsliding.”
• Hannah Feser and Wyatt C. Olson, mentored by Dr. Jeff Elbert. Project title: “Ethanol Concentration in Gas.”
• Emelye Josko, mentored by Dr. Andrew Sathoff. Project title: “Natural Bone Human Education Skeletons: Investigating Restoration and Ancestry.”
• Kierra Miller, mentored by Dr. Alex Dececchi. Project title: “Terror from the skies? Investigating the energetics and feeding ecology of one of the largest pterosaurs: Quetzalcoatlus.”

The Beacom College of Computer & Cyber Sciences

• Ivan Casamalhuapa, mentored by Dr. Rob Richardson. Project title: “Sequence Skipping and the Security Risk Associated.”
• Luke Constantino, mentored by Dr. Patrick Engebretson. Project title: “Web Application Honeypot Effectiveness in Attracting and Deceiving Threat Actors.”
• Joseph Doty and Zachary Myers, mentored by Dr. John Hastings. Project title: “Using LLMs to Synthesize Large Scale Human-Like Datasets for User Experience Studies.”
• Connor Ford, mentored by Dr. Cody Welu. Project title: “Is AI Threat Detection an Effective Substitute for our Current Real-Time Threat Detection Architectures and Methodologies.”
• Sureh San, mentored by Dr. Mark Spanier. Project title: “Natural Language Processing Applications in Medical Data.”

College of Business & Information Systems

• Shisir Proudel and Dijesh Shrestha, mentored by Dr. Yenling Chang. Project title “Evaluating the Feasibility of Blockchain Technology for Secure National Elections.”

The graduate winners include:

The Beacom College of Computer & Cyber Sciences

• Khanh Nguyen, MSCS, mentored by Dr. Khandaker Mamun Ahmed. Project title: “Optimizing the Phi-2 Small Language Model for Real-time Chatbot Applications Using Parameter-Efficient-Fine-Tuning (PEFT) with QLoRA Quantization.”
• Anusree Dommaraju, MSIS, and Prekshith Vattigunta, MSCS, mentored by Dr. Youssef Harrath. Project title: “An Enhanced Crypto Coupon System Using Blockchain.”

College of Business & Information Systems

• Abderrezak Allalen, Ph.D.IS, mentored by Dr. Omar El-Gayar. Project title: “Reinforcement Learning-Guided Genetic Algorithms with Self-Adaptive Mutation and Crossover for Feature Selection in Imbalanced Datasets.”
• Deependra Malla, PhDIS, mentored by Dr. Omar El-Gayar. Project title: “A Comprehensive Framework for Benchmarking Machine Learning Models: Integrating Performance Metrics, Explainability Techniques, and Robustness Assessments.”
• Salim Arfaoui, PhDIS, mentored by Dr. Omar El-Gayar. Project title: “Real-Time Privacy-Preserving Threat Detection in IoT Environments Using Federated Learning and Differential Privacy.”
• Yesu Vara Prasad Kollipara, PhDIS, mentored by Dr. Omar El-Gayar. Project title: “Enhancing Climate Change Mitigation: Am AI-Based System for Real-Time Monitoring of Environmental Changes Using Satellite Data.”