On Friday, June 13, an estimated 5,000 friends, family, faculty and staff packed the Alaska Airlines Arena in the University of Washington’s Hec Edmundson Pavilion to celebrate the Allen School’s graduating class of 2025. While the date invited superstition, the evening was full of jubilation as roughly 800 graduates collected their commemorative diplomas, flipped their tassels and made the transition from Allen School students to Allen School alumni.
“It feels like yesterday that we were welcoming you to the Allen School. And tonight we celebrate all you have accomplished here,” said Magdalena Balazinska, professor and director of the Allen School. “We are extremely proud of you. We are proud of all you have accomplished and can’t wait to see what you accomplish next!”
‘True impact doesn’t come from what you accumulate, but what you contribute.’
That was the message graduation speaker Trish Millines Dziko — co-founder and executive director of the Technology Access Foundation (TAF), computer scientist and proud Husky mom — delivered to the graduates as they contemplate the next stage of their journey. She was welcomed to the stage by professor Ed Lazowska, who exercised one of his last official acts in his 48th and final year as an Allen School faculty member by introducing Millines Dziko, calling her “a friend of mine and a hero of mine.”
“TAF uses STEM as a tool for social change,” Lazowska said during his introductory remarks. “And in its nearly 30 years, TAF has changed the lives of tens of thousands of students in our area.”
Technology as a tool for social change was a recurring theme in Millines Dziko’s speech — but, she noted, not always for the better. With more than 60% of the nation’s wealth concentrated in the top 10% of households, while the bottom 50% hold just 5%, Millines Dziko suggested that the world needs “more people who care enough to fix what’s broken.”
“You can use your critical thinking, problem solving, ideation, creation and leadership skills to build solutions to some of the most pressing problems like homelessness, generational poverty, public education, the environment and health care,” she said.
Whatever path they decide to pursue, the graduates will not be able to rely on their technical skills alone. Saying hard work and good grades were “just the beginning,” Millines Dziko advised the graduates to prioritize building relationships by showing themselves to be capable, reliable, truthful, empathetic and accountable. Developing these qualities would enable them to build social capital that, she noted, they could use along with technology and engineering “as the vehicle to creating a better future for everyone.”
“I hope you pursue purpose over profit, and let your values lead your vision. Please create solutions that lift people up and improve communities,” Millines Dziko urged. “Because in the end, changing the world isn’t about being remembered — it’s about doing things worth remembering.”
Alumni Impact Award: Nicki Dell (Ph.D., ‘15)
Nicki Dell is a shining example of what Millines Dziko talked about. Each year, the Allen School recognizes one or more alumni who have used their Allen School education to change the world. Since her own graduation a decade ago, the 2025 Alumni Impact honoree has been “doing things worth remembering” in the form of technologies that serve the needs of overlooked communities such as home health care workers and people experiencing intimate partner violence. Dell worked with professors Linda Shapiro and the late Gaetano Borriello on her way to earning the 500th doctoral degree awarded by the Allen School before taking up a faculty position at Cornell Tech.
In his remarks, presenter Shwetak Patel, professor and associate director of development and entrepreneurship, highlighted Dell’s leadership of the Clinic to End Tech Abuse (CETA) among her many contributions — contributions that had already earned her a SIGCHI Societal Impact Award as well as a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant.”
“She deeply partners with affected communities, and then builds systems and interventions that make our computer-mediated world safer and more equitable for everyone,” Patel said.
Recognizing student leadership and service
So many members of the Allen School’s undergraduate student body — which now numbers more than 2,200 — contribute to activities and events that enrich the student experience, it is difficult for the Undergraduate Student Services Team (USST) to choose the recipients of this and the Outstanding Senior awards. But choose, they did; after USST Director Crystal Eney invited all graduating students who were involved in outreach, community building and mentorship to stand and be recognized, the following individuals were singled out for their contributions to the Allen School community and the field of computing.
Undergraduate Service Awards
Honoree Kianna Roces Bolante was described as the “epitome of service” in her role as chair of the student group Computing Community, or COM^2, overseeing school-wide events and activities that build community among the undergraduate majors in the Allen School. In her two years at the helm, she earned a reputation — and universal appreciation — for interacting with the community she serves with empathy, intention and a commitment to inclusion. “Her leadership is a labor of love, and she is an inspiration to so many students on campus,” said Chloe Dolese Mandeville, senior assistant director for student engagement and access at the Allen School.
Joo Gyeong Kim was recognized for her foundational leadership in shaping the Allen School’s Changemakers in Computing (CIC) program that engages rising juniors and seniors in high school in learning about technology, society and justice. “As one of the founding mentors, she brought a thoughtful, mission-driven approach that helped define the program’s values and direction,” Dolese Mandeville said. She leaned heavily on that approach when she took on temporary leadership of the entire program one summer while both directors were out sick. Known as a steady and compassionate leader, Kim’s impact extends to the entire CIC community.
Anjali Singh was honored for her dedicated service in multiple roles with the Student Engagement & Access team. Starting with the Allen School Ambassadors — a team of current majors who engage middle and high school students in learning about computer science via school visits and field trips — Singh used her warmth and knack for storytelling to inspire students. She quickly rose to the position of lead ambassador before going on to help launch a new team of Student Recruitment Representatives. Having served hundreds of prospective students along the way, “her dedication, advocacy for accessible pathways into computing and long-standing service have left a lasting legacy,” Dolese Mandeville said.
Zhengyu Zhang was recognized for his service to the robotics research community in the Allen School. His contributions include the mastery of complex simulation tools, one-on-one mentorship and the development of an open-source repository that is used by researchers in multiple labs. Known for being generous with his time and willing to support others regardless of their skill level, Zhang’s collaboration, service and mentorship has, noted Dolese Mandeville, “enabled the success of countless students and researchers, from undergraduates to postdocs.”
Outstanding CSE Senior Awards
Balazinska called Bolante back to the stage to collect one of four awards designed to recognize students who demonstrate superior scholarship and leadership potential — qualities that Bolante has epitomized during her time at the Allen School. In addition to her aforementioned service contributions, she has also contributed to research supporting people with Parkinson’s disease, language preferences in disability communities and computer science education. For the latter, she developed a suite of six social computing modules which she piloted with more than 1,400 local high school students. Last year, she received a CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award from the Computing Research Association — one of four in the nation — for her work.
Eujean Lee was recognized for her outstanding academic achievements and research contributions, for which she was also nominated for a College of Engineering Dean’s Medal for Academic Excellence. As an undergraduate researcher in the Makeability Lab, Lee co-authored two papers on the use of augmented reality and computer vision to make sports more accessible to people with low vision — one of which earned a Best Paper Award at the Workshop on Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, Transparency and Ethics in Extended Reality (IDEATExR). Lee also served as vice president of the Korean Job Search Association, helping to connect students with career opportunities and resources.
Honoree Kenneth Yang’s research spans software engineering, neuroscience and computer graphics. He contributed to a paper presenting a suite of new, more reliable version control merge tools for shared repositories such as Git that was published at the IEEE/ACM International Conference Automated Software Engineering (ASE) — one of the top conferences in the field. He also developed new software tools for automating electrophysiology experiments to accelerate brain research and open up new avenues of experimentation. Yang previously received a CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award honorable mention for his work.
Andre Ye was recognized for blending technical innovation with humanistic insight in research that spans computer vision, machine learning and human-AI interaction. In the Allen School’s Social Futures Lab, he developed a framework to account for human uncertainty in medical image segmentation models that earned an honorable mention at the Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (HCOMP). He has also investigated the influence of linguistic and cultural differences on image captioning models and the use of language models to support critical thinking. Ye has earned multiple accolades, including a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship and a College of Arts & Sciences Dean’s Medal. He will pursue his Ph.D. at MIT in the fall.
Celebrating scholarly achievement
The path to a doctorate involves years of intensive, original research — as the 52 newly-hooded Ph.D. graduates seated on the floor of the arena could attest. But they are not the only Allen School students who make original contributions to the field on their way to earning a degree; a significant number of bachelor’s and fifth-year master’s students know their way around a lab, as well. Professors Leilani Battle and Maya Cakmak, co-chairs of the Allen School’s Undergraduate Research Committee, had the pleasure of highlighting several of them with Best Senior Thesis or Outstanding Master’s Thesis awards.
Best Senior Thesis (Winner)
Winner Andrew Shaw was recognized for his thesis titled “Agonistic Image Generation: Unsettling the Hegemony of Intention,” which was the result of a collaboration with Outstanding Senior honoree Andre Ye. Under the guidance of Allen School professors Ranjay Krishna and Amy Zhang, Shaw combined computer science and philosophy to develop a novel image generation interface that actively engages users with competing visual interpretations of their prompts, in consideration of the sociopolitical context, to facilitate user reflection. The paper was accepted to the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT).
Best Senior Thesis (Honorable Mention)
In his thesis titled “SAM2Act: Integrating A Visual Foundation Model with A Memory Architecture for Robotic Manipulation,” honorable mention recipient Haoquan Fang introduced new models that achieved state-of-the-art performance on existing benchmarks for robotic manipulation, plus a new benchmark for testing robots’ ability to act based on past information. Fung completed this work under the supervision of Allen School professor Dieter Fox and presented his results at the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) and the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR).
Outstanding Master’s Thesis (Winner)
Winner Hayoung Jung’s thesis, “Towards Inclusive Technologies: Examining Social Values and Harms in Large-Scale Sociotechnical Systems,” introduced technical approaches grounded in the social sciences to measure and mitigate human biases and social harms perpetuated by generative large language models and algorithmically driven platforms such as YouTube. Jung completed this work, which was published in multiple top-tier conferences, under the guidance of Tanu Mitra, a professor in the UW Information School and adjunct faculty member in the Allen School. Jung will begin his Ph.D. in computer science at Princeton University in the fall.
Outstanding Master’s Thesis (Honorable Mention)
In his thesis titled “On the Existential and Strong Unforgeability of Multi-Signatures in the Discrete Log Setting,” honorable mention recipient Sela Navot advanced new theories and protocols for generating secure digital signatures in distributed, multi-party scenarios such as blockchain systems. Navot completed this work, which was published at the International Conference on the Theory and Application of Cryptology and Information Security (Asiacrypt), under the guidance of Allen School professor Stefano Tessaro.
Honoring excellence in teaching
Bob Bandes Memorial Awards
The Bob Bandes Memorial Award for Outstanding Teaching, which is named in honor of a graduate student who died in a skydiving accident in 1983, recognizes exceptional teaching assistants (TAs) who go above and beyond in service to the thousands of students who take Allen School courses each year. Over the past year, roughly 650 undergraduate or graduate students served as TAs; among those, nearly 250 individuals were nominated for Bandes Award recognition via over 600 nominations submitted by Allen School faculty and students.
Winner Naama Amiel served as a TA for CSE 351: The Hardware/Software Interface, no fewer than six times before her latest TA assignment with CSE 451: Introduction to Operating Systems. According to one nominator, “Anyone that talks to her can explain and help others struggling with the same things, so she creates a chain of learning that has impacts far beyond her conversations and office hours.”
Fellow winner Antonio Ballesteros was honored for his kindness and patience in meeting students where they are in his role as TA for two courses — once for CSE 391: System and Software Tools, and three times for CSE 331: Software Design and Implementation. “In every interaction with Antonio as a student, it is clear that he deeply cares about every student’s learning and experience in the course,” one nominator said.
The third and final winner, Amal Jacob, served as a TA for CSE 344: Introduction to Data Management a total of six times, for five different instructors. Known as patient, friendly, professional and dedicated, Jacob earned the appreciation of instructors for routinely picking up extra responsibilities — often before they even realized there were gaps that needed filling — and was heralded by at least one student nominator as “one of the best TA’s I have had in the Allen School.”
The Allen School also recognized three TAs with honorable mentions. Elizabeth Shirakian was a TA nine times for the Allen School’s revamped introductory programming course series, specifically CSE 121 and CSE 122, and will be the instructor for the summer offering of CSE 122. Megan Wangsawijaya was a TA multiple times for CSE 390T: Transfer Admit Seminar that helps newly arrived transfer students acclimate to the Allen School, as well as CSE 390Z: Mathematics for Computation Workshop, a companion to the Allen School’s Foundations of Computing course. Last but not least, Ph.D. student Zhihan Zhang earned “rave reviews” for his support of student teams enrolled in the CSE 475: Embedded Systems Capstone course.
Undergraduate Teaching Awards
Bolante presented the 2025 Undergraduate Teaching Awards in her capacity as chair of COM^2, the largest Allen School student organization that represents all undergraduate majors.
“As we celebrate the class of 2025, it’s worth remembering that none of us reached this stage alone,” Bolante said. “Educators do more than teach; they support us, inspire us and help shape the paths we take.”
Bolante described the first honoree, Ruth Anderson, as a “powerhouse” within the Allen School who has made a lasting impact on students as well as TAs. “In every class she teaches, Ruth creates a clear and supportive environment where students feel empowered to engage with complex material and build lasting understanding,” observed Bolante, noting that her work with TA’s elevates the quality of teaching across the school.
Anderson’s fellow honoree, Lauren Bricker, was Bolante’s first professor by way of the Allen School Scholars Program — making the presentation of this award especially meaningful. “Lauren brings warmth, enthusiasm and genuine care to absolutely everything she does…She creates inclusive spaces where students feel supported and encouraged to grow,” Bolante said. “Through her tireless support and advocacy, Lauren continues to inspire and uplift our community.”
Watch the Allen School graduation video on YouTube, and read GeekWire’s coverage of Millines Dziko’s graduation speech.
Congratulations to the Allen School Class of 2025! In the words of Trish Millines Dziko, “Go out and build a life that matters!”
