Tijana Milenkovic, the Frank M. Freimann Collegiate Associate Professor of Engineering, has received the CRA-E Undergraduate Research Faculty Mentoring Award.
She is one of two winners of this award for 2021.
The CRA is the Computing Research Association, the national association of academic departments of computer science, computer engineering, and related fields. The annual award honors full-time faculty members who have provided “exceptional mentorship, undergraduate research experiences, and guidance on admission and matriculation to research-focused graduate programs in computing.”
Professor Milenkovic is passionate about engaging undergraduate students in research, and she has mentored many undergraduates since joining the Notre Dame faculty in 2010, said Jane Cleland-Huang, professor of computer science and engineering and director of graduate studies.
“Professor Milenkovic has provided exceptional mentorship to her students. Many of the undergraduates she has mentored are enrolled in Ph.D. programs or have graduated and now hold academic positions. Others have pursued careers in the high-tech computer industry.”
According to former student Huili Chen, now a doctoral candidate in the Personal Robots Group in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, “Professor Milenkovic’s mentorship greatly cultivated my passion for computational research.
“She equipped me, as an undergraduate, with the necessary skills to conduct graduate-level research. She gave me the opportunity to work on both application and algorithm sides of computational research and taught me how to draft grant proposals, review and critique research papers, and present my work to different audiences.”
Milenkovic directs the Complex Networks Lab, which solves challenging problems in the fields of network science, graph algorithms, computational biology, health and well-being, and social networks.
Her previous awards include the Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Program (AFOSR YIP) award in 2016 and the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award in 2015.
Originally published by the College of Engineering on March 3, 2021.