Three Students Receive Honorable Mention in CRA Undergraduate Research Awards

Three Northwestern students—Shraeya Iyer, Xi-Aan Loh, and Nalin (Fai) Poungpeth—received honorable mentions in the Computer Research Association (CRA) 2026 Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award competition announced this month.

“I am delighted to see the continued success and recognition of our undergraduate researchers,” said Samir Khuller, Peter and Adrienne Barris Chair of Computer Science at Northwestern Engineering. “Over the last five years we have done incredibly well with a consistent performance in this competition.”

Iyer is a fourth-year student in computer science at the McCormick School of Engineering with a major concentration in AI. She is also pursuing a minor in philosophy through Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. Loh is a third-year student in computer science at Northwestern Engineering. And Poungpeth is a fourth-year student pursuing a double major in cognitive science and data science from Weinberg and a human-computer interaction (HCI) certificate through the Center for Human-Computer Interaction + Design.

The nationwide CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award program, supported by the US Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratories and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, recognizes undergraduate students who demonstrate exemplary potential in computing research.

Haoqi Zhang, associate professor of computer science, and academic adviser Yassaman Shemirani, coordinated this year’s submissions.

“It’s wonderful to see our undergraduate students engaging in independent research, to move beyond acquiring knowledge in the classroom to making discoveries of their own,” Zhang said. “I am thrilled to see the research success of these students, and of our continued efforts to create learning opportunities for students to work with not knowing, to build new knowledge, and to innovate.”

“I am pleased to see their hard work recognized and extend my congratulations to the department’s CRA nominees,” Shemirani said.

Iyer aims to build technology that safely, equitably, and accountably supports human decision-making, social relationships, and institutional trust. As a research assistant with Northwestern’s Law and Technology Initiative, Iyer is working on improving the legal reasoning capabilities of large language models. In collaboration with Professor Daniel W. Linna Jr., Jaromir Savelka (Carnegie Mellon University), and Hannes Westermann (Maastricht University), she is co-authoring a survey paper and book chapter that analyzes technical methods for evaluating AI applications for legal tasks and introduces an evaluation framework. Iyer is also a data science intern in Professor Noshir Contractor’s Science of Networks in Communities (SONIC) Lab. Supervised by Megan Chan, a PhD candidate in industrial engineering and management sciences, Iyer co-developed and co-implemented a sentiment weighted multiplex social network analysis examining low-performing influencer effects on team synergy.

“I’m incredibly honored to receive this recognition, as it affirms and motivates my commitment to bridging computer science with its larger ethical and social impact,” Iyer said.

Loh joined Karan Ahuja’s Sensing, Perception, Interactive Computing and Experiences (SPICE) Lab to explore computer science research for the first time. Loh’s work with the SPICE Lab team focuses on developing a framework for markerless motion capture, transforming multi-camera footage into 3D body and hand meshes for downstream analysis. By teaching computers how to model human movement, Loh aims to build intelligent systems that can perceive and sense human behavior for application in domains including healthcare, education, and scientific discovery.

"Receiving this recognition is a significant milestone,” Loh said. “I can proudly say I've contributed to the field of pose estimation.”

Poungpeth studies how AI can impact and improve human-human and human-AI communication. Through the Design, Use, Build (DUB) REU program, she collaborated with Tanu Mitra (University of Washington) to research persuasive strategies that are naturally adopted by LLMs in human-AI interactions. Supported by Northwestern's Cognitive Science Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship, she is also working with Professor Matt Groh to investigate how reliably LLMs can evaluate and improve human empathic communication. Poungpeth's work has been accepted at Nature Machine Intelligence, and her contributions have been recognized by the Robert J. Glushko Prize for Undergraduate Excellence in Cognitive Science. She is currently applying to PhD programs in computer science, informatics, or human-computer interaction and aims to pursue a career in human-AI interaction research.

“Receiving the CRA Honorable Mention was extremely meaningful to me,” Poungpeth said. “It’s an indicator that I'm going in the right direction.”