Adnan Haider (CS 2nd year) was selected as a finalist for a 2016 Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award by the Computing Research Association. The awards recognize undergraduate students in North American universities who show outstanding potential in an area of computing research. Haider was nominated by the Department of Computer Science.

Other finalists in Haider’s category were from Harvard University, Columbia University, Georgia Institute of Technology, and the University of Kentucky. The runner-up was from University of California-Berkeley, and the winner was from the University of Rochester.

Working with Xian-He Sun, Distinguished Professor of Computer Science, and Dong (Kevin) Jin, assistant professor of computer science, Haider published four research papers in 2015. One of the papers received the best paper award at the ACM SIGSIM Conference on Principles of Advanced Discrete Simulation (PADS15). Another (with Haider as sole author) won first place (gold) for undergraduate research at the ACM/IEEE International Conference for High-Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC15).