IEEE WISC Scholarships

The IEEE WISC Scholarships are presented to deserving female students pursuing technical educations. Both graduate and undergraduate students were considered for the scholarships. Applicants were judged based on their technical interests, career goals, contributions to the STEM community, etc... In 2021, two types of scholarships were awarded. The IEEE WISC Premier Scholarship was awarded to 3 students (1 award per region) with a $500 monetary award. The IEEE WISC Scholarship was awarded to 9 students (3 awards per region) with a $300 monetary award. Congratulations to all of our scholarship recipients!

WISC Premier Scholarship Awardees
	Amani Abusafia is a Ph.D. student under the supervision of Athman Bouguettaya at the University of Sydney. She received her bachelor's degree and her master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, in 2009 and 2013 respectively. She worked as a lecturer at the Department of Computer Science at University of Sharjah for 6 years. Her research interests include service computing, crowdsourcing, and IoT.
	Eng. Marah Talal Alhalabi received her B.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering in August 2017 from Abu Dhabi University and is currently pursuing her M.Sc. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering. Marah is a member of the AI in BioImaging Research Lab and works as a Teaching Assistant of Electrical and Computer Engineering as well as a Research Associate at the Research Lab. She has worked on several awarded projects and competed in prestigious competitions. She was the runner-up for two years in a row in the UAE’s ThinkScience national competition in the Smart Systems and AI category. She also received the People’s Choice Award in the 2018 MENA region Future Generation Competition. She received the “Best Paper Award” for her paper An Integrated Caregiver-Focused mHealth Framework for Elderly Care in 2015 at the Third International Workshop on e-Health Pervasive Wireless Applications and Services. Marah was awarded the Overall Award of Excellence in the College of Engineering at Abu Dhabi University in 2015-2016. Her research interests include machine learning, computing, bioimaging, and smart systems.
	Hadjer Benmeziane received her Master and Engineering degrees in Computer Science at the Higher National School of Computer Science, Algiers, Algeria in July 2020. She is currently pursuing a PhD degree in Computer Science at the Polytechnic University of Hauts-de-France, LAMIH/CNRS, Valenciennes, France. Currently, she’s working on accelerating AI services on different hardware platforms by leveraging Hardware-aware Neural Architecture Search.
WISC Scholarship Awardees
	Balsam Alkouz is a PhD student under the supervision of Prof. Athman Bouguettaya at the University of Sydney. She received her bachelor's degree in IT Multimedia and master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, in 2016 and 2018 respectively. She worked as a Research Assistant in the Data Mining and Multimedia Research at the University of Sharjah. Her interests focus on IoT, service computing, and include data mining. She is a Women Techmakers Ambassador and a Google Developer Student Club strategy and operations team member at the University of Sydney.
	Vaidehi Thakre is currently pursuing her B. Tech degree focused in Computer Science Majors from Dr. Vishwanath Karad MIT World Peace University. Vaidehi has an excellent academic background as she has consistently maintained a 9.6+/10 CGPA throughout her engineering span. She finds herself to be an avid researcher and her prime research interests include Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Neuroscience, and Forensic Anthropology. She has published 3 research papers, one of which titled ‘PCOcare: PCOS Detection and Prediction using Machine Learning Algorithms’ was awarded the ‘Best Paper Award - Machine Learning Track’. Vaidehi serves as an AI R&D intern at In-Med Prognostics, India where she is instrumental in researching Neurodegeneration and how AI is relevant in this domain. Vaidehi, apart from her academics, is extremely active in Co-Curricular and Extra-Curricular. She is a Global Ambassador for two organizations: WomenTech Network and Society of Women Engineers and dynamically works to support their cause and mission. Last but not least, Vaidehi is a student volunteer at two NGOs and teaches young underprivileged kids in rural India English and Science subjects. Vaidehi has been awarded numerous scholarships for her exemplary academic nature and has been recognized on several platforms for her contribution to the Society of Women Engineers. Vaidehi wishes to devote her knowledge and engineering aptitude for Healthcare Research.
	Eng. Maha Yaghi is an MSc in Electrical and Computer Engineering student and a Teaching Assistant of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Abu Dhabi University. She is interested in Mobile applications, Embedded systems, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Machine Learning in Medicine, and Hardware and Software programming. She received her B.Sc. in Computer Engineering from Abu Dhabi University in 2019 and was a consistent dean’s lister. She has led her capstone team towards developing a Computer-Aided Diagnosis and Visualization system of Cancerous Nodules in 2019. During COVID-19, she developed and co-authored systems that use multiple video object tracking techniques to monitor social distancing and face recognition techniques to aid governments in enforcing home quarantines. She won first place for two years in a row in the national Emirates Global Aluminum competition to design robots and drones for monitoring the health of industrial processes and published her work in MDPI Sensors. She has also worked on various projects, including a Quarantine tracking app and a Wearable IoT-based Joint Flexion Sensing device for Computer-Aided Diagnosis of Motion Ailments, and received multiple awards.
	Snehal Khandve is cuurrently pursuing Bachelors in Computer Engineering at University of Pune. She is active in competitive programming, web-development and internships. She has explored Natural Language Processing(NLP) in AI and published a research paper in the domain. She enjoy doing full-stack development and have a knack for problem solving.
	Aishwariya Chakraborty is a Ph.D. student at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur, working under the supervision of Prof. Sudip Misra and Prof. Jhareswar Maiti. She works in the domain of Internet of Things-based networks and services. Prior to this, she received her Master of Science (by Research) (MS) degree from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Kharagpur in 2019. Her MS thesis is entitled "QoS-Aware Sensors-as-a-Service in Sensor-Cloud". Previously, she completed her Bachelor of Technology degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from Institute of Engineering and Management, Kolkata, India in 2015. She is a recipient of the N2Women Young Researcher Fellowship 2020 and AnitaB.org Grace Hopper Student Scholarship 2021. She is a member of Smart Wireless Applications & Networking (SWAN) Research Group, IIT Kharagpur. She is also an active volunteer of IEEE and a student member of ACM. To know more about her work, please visit <a href="https://aishwariyachakraborty.github.io/" target="blank"> https://aishwariyachakraborty.github.io/.</a>
	Krisha Bhambani is a pursuing her Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the Pune Institute of Computer Technology in India. She is currently in her final year. She is an accomplished developer, who specializes in the fields of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Krisha is deeply passionate about the projects she works on. Some of her projects have received national and international acclaim, and funding from notable institutes. She has publications in the domains of security and applications of machine learning.
	Poorva Bedmutha is pursuing her Bachelors from Pune Institute of Computer Technology in Electronics & Telecommunications, with an Honor’s in Data Science. She is highly passionate about Machine Learning and Computer Vision and aims to leverage its power through Cloud Computing to develop algorithms for a smarter tomorrow. Partly, she is doing so by volunteering as an ML Engineer at Omdena. She also volunteers at PICToSocial, a local organization, to educate and guide underprivileged kids. Beyond academics, she has been learning Hindustani Classical Music for over a decade and is also a trained Yoga practitioner! Her goal is to contribute to research and education in the fields of Machine Learning and Data Science. Having had the privilege of being the first woman in her family to pursue STEM, she aspires to inspire and enable other women to pursue sciences.
	Fariha Tasmin Jaigirdar is a final year Ph.D. student in the Department of Software Systems and Cybersecurity at the Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, Australia. She is a member of IEEE, Australian Women in Security Network, N2Women Network, and Institute of Engineers (IEB) Bangladesh. Her research interests include different security applications of the Internet of Things (IoT), system engineering design and security analysis, trust and risk investigation, and security in health informatics. She has been in security-related research for more than nine years and has published several articles in renowned conferences and journals. She also serves as a volunteer in different women networking groups and organizes academic and social events.
	Urjoshi Sinha is a fourth year PhD student in the department of Computer Science at Iowa State University. Her research focuses on automated software testing of highly customizable and data-driven software. Some of her recent work has used search-based optimization techniques such as genetic algorithms, to optimize configuration spaces in bio-informatics tools. Additionally, she is interested in big data systems and machine learning. She has around four years of professional experience working at Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. in the area of database development and in server and database administration. In her spare time, she loves hiking and volunteering for STEM organizations on and off campus. She is also a TED Translator volunteer transcribing English talks from the TED series to Bengali.