Awards & Honors

The Computer Science Department encourages students to strive for excellence and, in turn, celebrates exceptional student achievements. Accolades are awarded to students for distinguished academic performance, departmental service leadership and undergraduate research.

Distinguished Computer Science Student Award

• (2024):Rachel Prusacki
• (2023):Joshua Comfort|Caroline Smith
• (2022):Willem Lucus|Ryan Rosiak
• (2021):Michael Mandulak|Stephanie Warman
• (2020):Shannon Bull|Lucas Martin
• (2019):Jack Hillman
• (2018):Omar Aboul-Enein|Justin Snellings
• (2017):Nghia Tran
• (2016):Sean Dillon|Stephen Krucelyak|Geordan Neukum|Colleen Rogers
• (2015):Rachel Hollis
• (2014):Miracle Chike-Udeagha|David Eberius
• (2013):Jason Tominack
• (2012):James Aswell
• (2011):Joseph Fowler|Mick Tindall
• (2010):Evan Kaufman|Brian Lucas
• (2009):Paul Halvorsen|Benjamin Thomas
• (2008):David Walser
• (2007):Israa Taha
• (2006):Brian Price
• (2005):Daniel Pace
• (2004):Timothy Baldwin
• (2003):Sean Dukehart
• (2002):Shannon Ostiguy|Timothy Wilson
• (2001):Melissa Spuria
• (2000):Brian Guarraci

Service Award

• (2023):James Montebell
• (2022):Jungho An

Departmental Honors' Theses

The Departmental Honors Thesis presents students unique opportunity to conduct in-depth research in computer science or related fields under the close faculty mentorship. To qualify for the departmental honors, a student must meet all the following criteria:

• The student must qualify for institutional honors (cum laude or better).
• The student must complete at least 18 hours of upper-division courses in computer science at Salisbury University.
• The student must earn a cumulative GPA of at least 3. 5 in all upper-level courses in computer science taken at Salisbury University.

• The student must assemble an Honors Advisory Committee consisting of an advisor and two additional faculty members. This committee must be approved by the department chair. The advisor must be on the faculty of the Department of Computer Science. The other two committee members can be faculty members in the Computer Science department or in a department relevant to the thesis topic.
• The student must write an honors’ thesis. This thesis must consist of original research in a subject area approved by the thesis committee.
• The student must give a presentation of his/her research to the Department of Computer Science faculty members and the committee members.
• The student must be approved for departmental honors by an absolute majority of the Department of Computer Science faculty and the committee members. An “absolute majority” requires that the number of “yes” votes minus the number of “no” votes is not less than half of the total number of faculty voting, counting abstentions. The faculty and its committee members will make this decision based on both the student’s written thesis and the student’s research presentation.

For more information, please contact Lauren Ruark at laruark@salisbury.edu.

Previous Honors’ Theses:

Blaine Mason (2023)

• Title: A Naive Approach To Robust And Efficient Learning Of Some Simplicial Polytopes
• Advisors:   Dr. Joe Anderson   |   Dr. Mike Bardzell   |   Dr. Jiacheng Cai   |   Dr. Junyi Tu

Michael Mandulak (2021)

• Title: Improvement And Analysis Of Parallel Iterative Improvement Stable Matching
• Advisors:   Dr. Enyue (Annie) Lu

Omar Aboul-Enein (2018)

• Title: Formalizing Performance Evaluation Of Mobile Manipulator Robots Using CTML
• Advisors:   Dr. Yaping Jing

Stephen Krucelyak (2016)

• Title: Clustering Algorithms For Large-Scale Graphs Using MapReduce
• Advisors:   Dr. Enyue (Annie) Lu

Matthew Chapman (2011)

• Title: Distributed Parallel Processing MapReduce And Its Application In Finding Patterns In Social Networks
• Advisors:   Dr. Enyue (Annie) Lu

Joseph Fowler (2001)

• Title: Translator-Based Multi-Paradigm Programming
• Advisors:   Dr. Xiaohong (Sophie) Wang