Verizon Rising Stars

Benessa Defend (left) and Megan Olsen, this year's Verizon Rising Star Fellows.

For the third straight year, the Verizon Foundation has awarded fellowships to two rising second year graduate students in the Computer Science Department. This year’s recipients of the Verizon Rising Star Fellowships are Benessa Defend and Megan Olsen.

Defend is a Ph.D. student advised by Assistant Professor Kevin Fu in the PRivacy, Internetworking, Security, and Mobile Systems Laboratory (PRISMS), where she investigates RFID security/privacy and human authentication using brain waves. In addition to the Verizon Fellowship, she is a recipient of the Ford Foundation Diversity Predoctoral Fellowship and of the 2006 NSF East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes Fellowship for research at Kyushu University in Japan. Defend is currently in Japan at Kyushu University for a five month collaborative RFID study abroad experience. Her research involves security, privacy, and anonymity with a focus on RFID and resource-constrained devices. She is a member of the RFID Consortium for Security and Privacy (RFID-CUSP). In 2005, she earned her B.S. in Computer Science from Austin Peay State University.

Olsen is a Ph.D. student advised by Associate Professor Hava T. Siegelmann in the Biologically Inspired Neural and Dynamical Systems Lab (BINDS).  In addition to the Verizon Fellowship, she is currently funded by a Department of Homeland Security Fellowship. Her research interests are in biologically inspired computation and artificial intelligence. Her current work includes improving the robustness of self-regenerating cooperative multi-agent systems, and examining the role of apoptosis in breast cancer via a multi-agent simulation. In 2005, she received a B.S. in Computer Science from Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University (Virginia Tech). For more details on Olsen, see the accompanying student focus article.