Recognition & Honors
Accolades & Acknowledgements
909 NSM students graduated with their bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees on May 14. 312 of those students graduated with honors. This year’s graduating class for UH was the largest in the history of the university, with 7,819 graduates.
Yun-Hsien Lin, a Ph.D. graduate in chemistry, was awarded the Dan E. Wells Outstanding Dissertation Award. His dissertation, “Cyclotetrabenzoin and Its Derivatives in Energy-Relevant Applications,” focuses on addressing pressing energy and environmental challenges through the development of advanced carbon-based materials. He received a $1,000 award for his outstanding achievement.
The Center for Nuclear Receptors and Cell Signaling (CNRCS) Symposium was held April 29, 2026 in the Student Center South Multipurpose room. The symposium showcased ongoing research at CNRCS, with Dr. Patrick Hwu, former mentor to CNRCS Director Dr. Weiyi Peng, serving as a keynote speaker.
Milton Rosa, an undergraduate in the Department of Computer Science, is set to receive at $5,000 scholarship from the British Foundation of Texas (BAFTX), which helps Texas-based students fulfill their “exceptional potential.” The award is being backed by Heriberto Triana, who is a UH alumni and graduated from NSM in 2022. Triana wanted to “pay it forward” to a student from NSM’s computer science department.
NSM held its first General Assembly (faculty and staff meeting) in April, echoing some of the themes the recent Provost address and highlighting some of our recent accomplishments and reporting on priorities and progress in student success, research, and shared governance. It was well attended and seemingly well received. Dean Dudley expects to hold an event like this each semester, with introductions and initiatives in fall and accomplishments and progress in spring.
In the News
Seema Khurana, a professor in the Department of Biology and Biochemistry, has been featured by UH Media and Communications this week for her research focusing on stress signals in cells that prevent gut lining from healing in Crohn’s patients. Her team’s contributions have been published in Gastro Help Advances.
Nouhad Rizk, professor of computer science, held the UH AI and Data Science Showcase on May 6. It was featured by UH Marketing and Communications. Professor Rizk also held a hackathon for a group of computer science students earlier that month.
Jiajia Sun, professor in the Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Department, was featured as a guest editor for a special issue on Geophysics in Critical Minerals. The Society of Exploration Geophysicists (SEG) also interviewed Sun on their podcast.
Publications
Computer science professor Dr. Albert Cheng, alongside his Ph.D. student Michael Yantosca, has had a long paper accepted by the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026). Dr. Cheng co-authored the paper, titled “Spectral Gravity Formant Estimation for Phonetic Segmentation,” with Yantosca, marking the second consecutive year that a collaboration between the professor and his student has been accepted by the ACL.