Alumni Honors

Student Awards

Starting in 2019, the data science program has awarded the "Data Science Capstone Award" for the  best student capstone project and the "Data Science excellence award for highest graduating senior GPA". See our Capstone Day Program for a list of all projects since 2019-2020.

2022-2023

Data Science Capstone Award winner

  • Ethan Ducharme, "Generating a Database to track decline of endangered species"

2021-2022

Data Science Capstone Award winner

  • Ben Pfeffer, "Generating Cancer Images to Improve Cancer Diagnosis Accuracy" (video)

Data Science Capstone Award Honorable Mention

  • Andrew Anctil, "Deep Learning for Document Data Extraction and Classification" (video)
  • Sal Balkus, "Improving Natural Language Classification With Augmented Data From GPT-3" (video)
  • Nick Collins, "Fitchburg State Baseball Team Dashboard" (video)
  • Nathan Rice, "A Database User Interface Web Application for Green Energy Consumers Alliance’s Renewable Energy Certificate Allocation Task and Inventory Management" (video)

All presentations from 2022 can be seen here (videos titled "2021 UMassD Capstone")

Data Science Excellence Award winner

  • Sal Balkus
  • Ben Pfeffer (Honorable mention)

2020-2021

Data Science Capstone Award winner

  • Brian Cornet, "Optical Character Recognition and Correction for Images of Digital Displays" (video)

Data Science Capstone Award Honorable Mention

  • Brianna Johnson, "Detecting Medical Errors in the Cancer Screening Process: An In-Depth Review of Lung Cancer Screening and At-Risk Qualifications" (video)

All presentations from 2021 can be seen here (videos titled "2021 UMassD Capstone")

Data Science Excellence Award winner

  • Brian Cornet
  • Marco Sousa (Honorable mention; Math/Data Science double major)

2019-2020

Data Science Capstone Award winner

  • Jacob Zuliani, "Optimizing User Behaivor with Large Scale Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning" (video)

Data Science Capstone Award Honorable Mention

  • Nate Cady, "Classifying neutron star signals from gravitational Waves" (video)
  • Justin Quinlan, "Predicting the Market Value of Soccer Players" (video)
  • Ian Russel, "Data Driven Tools for Political Science in Data Acquisition and Visualization" (video)
  • Dunick Voltaire, "Building a used car prediction calculator" (video)

All presentations from 2019 can be seen here (videos titled "UMass Dartmouth Data Science Capstone")

Data Science Excellence Award winner

  • Dwyer Deighan

Student News/Spotlights

  • (2022) Salvador Balkus discusses how the data science program prepared him to pursue a PhD in Biostatistics at Harvard (article). Sal was also awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship
  • (2021) Brianna Johnson talks about working on data-driven research projects, serving as a student director in the Honors College, & landing a full-time position as a business systems analyst at a startup company. (article)
  • (2021) Congratulations to Sal Balkus for being the recipient of the Dean's Scholarship!
  • (2021) UMassD Big Data Club members win "Best data visualization" for the third consecutive year & become runners-up in the "Best Insight" category during the 2021 virtual DataFest. (article)
  • (2019) Data science major Sean Tocci plans to teach middle school and create apps for struggling students  (article)
  • (2018) Opportunities for research have provided Colin Brown '18 with new perspectives on data science and his own career path. (article)