Janicke Wins Judith A. Resnik Award
CEE senior Lauren Janicke, has received the Judith A. Resnik Award for her exceptional academic accomplishments. Lauren is pursuing a civil and environmental engineering major and a statistics minor. She has already gained significant research experience during her undergraduate studies, and her academic performance is outstanding. She has excelled in challenging statistics, computation, and data science courses.
Professor Destenie Nock, who has been working with Lauren since May 2020, has praised her as an independent self-starter with strong analytical skills and coding ability. Lauren led a research paper published in a top-tier energy journal, Energy. Professor Nock believes that Lauren's ability to overcome obstacles and persist towards a research goal is a critical trait of a successful researcher. She is confident that Lauren will be successful in her career path as she possesses grit, asks critical questions, and aims to use her research to benefit society.
One of Lauren's professors, Peter Freeman, noted that Lauren was the first non-statistics major to take his Introduction to Statistical Research Methodology course. He was impressed with her performance and shared that for her final project, Lauren differentiated galaxies with no or narrow emission lines from those with broader emission lines using statistical models to analyze the data. Lauren implemented and tested 19 different models and found that logistic regression worked best with her data.
Professor Jerry Wang, who taught Lauren Intro to Computation and Data Science in CEE, was similarly impressed with her analytical abilities. This challenging course covers a broad range of topics in computational science, including numerical analysis, linear algebra, and probability theory. Janicke routinely completed challenging technical problems on assignments and in-class activities with ease and flair.
The Judith A. Resnik Award, named after Carnegie Mellon alumna and space shuttle Challenger astronaut Dr. Judith A. Resnik, is presented annually to an exceptional woman graduating in the sciences or engineering who plans to attend graduate school. The recipient's academic performance, creativity, and vision illustrate potential for high academic achievement in her field.