Outstanding Thesis and Dissertation Award Winners
grad award
Two former computer science students, Anushman Misra and Jaykumar Kakkad, received the 2024 UIC Outstanding Thesis and Dissertation Awards from the Graduate College.
The awards are presented to former students who earned their doctoral or master’s degrees during the previous academic year. Each graduate program can nominate one or two master’s thesis and dissertations for consideration; based on the size of the program.
This year, only five awards were given:: Kakkad received the only outstanding thesis award, and Misra was one of four outstanding dissertations across the university.
Misra earned his degree in the summer of 2024 and was advised by Professor Ajay Kshemkalyani. Misra’s PhD dissertation, Byzantine Fault-Tolerant Causal Ordering and Causality Detection in Distributed Systems, studies the fundamental problems of causality detection and enforcement in the presence of Byzantine (arbitrarily misbehaving) processes in distributed systems. In Fall 2024, he joined Purdue University, Fort Wayne, as an assistant professor.
Kakkad was advised by Assistant Professor Sourav Medya. In addition to his MS from UIC’s computer science department, he holds a Master’s in analytics from Georgia Tech, and is a Chartered Financial Analyst, and has over a decade of experience in the investment industry. After earning his degree last spring, Kakkad joined Fiserv as a java developer.