Nayha Auradkar awarded the 2022 Allen AI Outstanding Engineer Scholarship
UW Allen School senior and rising Master’s student Nayha Auradkar was named the recipient of AI2's 2022 Allen AI Outstanding Engineer Scholarship. We offer this scholarship to one outstanding engineering student each year as part of our ongoing efforts to encourage diversity and equity across AI disciplines and career levels, as well as to strengthen the important connections between academic and industry research. The scholarship covers full tuition for one academic year and is accompanied by mentorship and a paid summer internship at AI2.
Among an excellent cohort of applicants, Nayha stood out with her strong motivation for using technology to make positive impacts for people with disabilities. Driven by her personal experiences as someone with a disability, Nayha is deeply passionate about driving research that advances accessibility in multiple ways. As a Computer Science major with a minor in Neural Computation & Engineering, she has performed research at an HCI (Human Computer Interaction) lab at the Allen School called the Make4All lab for the past two years. She is currently performing neural engineering research at the NERD lab to understand how communication is affected in patients with conditions like epilepsy.
In addition to research, Nayha is also actively involved in community advocacy for women and people with disabilities. She served as the Chair of ACM-W at the Allen School and the K-12 Outreach Director for the Society of Women Engineers at UW. Nayha also founded and leads two groups for students with disabilities — Huskies Who Stutter, to support students at UW who stutter, and Ability, to support students with disabilities at the Allen School.
The Allen School recently recognized Nayha and fellow undergraduate Caiwei Tian during their annual celebration of diversity in computing. We extend our congratulations and we look forward to her contributions to AI2 during her upcoming internship.
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