Jessica Gross is the TA and Graduate Admissions Coordinator in the CSE Student Affairs, and she is one of two winners for the department at the Graduate Student Association (GSA) Community Awards. Meanwhile, Ph.D. candidate Dustin Richmond -- who expects to graduate this June -- was also singled out for an award: the GSA Community Award for Outstanding Community Leader.
Gross (at right) won the Community Award for Graduate Student Support Staff. She oversees the TA and tutor programs in CSE as well as graduate admissions and recruitment for the Ph.D. program. The Support Staff Award honors UC San Diego staff who go "above and beyond" their job requirements in assisting graduate students. According to CSE Prof. Sorin Lerner, Gross works "tirelessly on TA-assignments, Ph.D. admission and Ph.D. Visit Day, this year organizing the visit of over 40 prospective Ph.D. students, including assisting them with travel and accommodations," said CSE Prof. Sorin Lerner. She was also involved with the renovation of the graduate student lounge (Chez Bob) and regularly helps with Social Hour. Gross also attends and contributes to many meetings of the Graduate Community Council, a department group dedicated to improving graduate community in the CSE department. Gross is a UC San Diego alumna, having received her B.A. in Linguistics in 2012. She began working as a graduate program assistant in CSE while still an undergraduates, and began working as an intake advisor in Student Affairs, also in the CSE department.
In awarding the Outstanding Community Leader honor to Dustin Richmond (at left), the GSA cited his role for several years in a row in leading graduate-student volunteers for Visit Day. In 2015-16, he also led the student-faculty candidate meetings and evaluations, which resulted in very thoughtful and well-organized comments. Richmond was the key instigator for the re-do of the Chez Bob graduate lounge and he played a huge leadership role in making those renovations happen. As the recipient of an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship in 2012, Richmond was also cited for having taken upon himself the responsibility of organizing several workshops to help fellow CSE graduate students learn how to apply successfully for NSF fellowships. He has been pursuing his Ph.D. in CSE since 2012, prior to which he did simultaneous undergraduate degrees in Computer Engineering and Electrical Engineering at the University of Washington. Under his advisor, CSE Prof. Ryan Kastner, Richmond is designing an ultra-high-speed image processing pipeline for active 3D scanners using compressive-sensing techniques. He is also the lead designer for an FPGA system to decompress and process 20,000-plus images per second.
"Congratulations are due to both Dustin and Jessica, as well as thanks to all of our wonderful staff and grad students who are tirelessly maintaining our sense of community in CSE," noted Lerner. "Jessica's and Dustin's achievements would not have been possible without the heroic efforts of our very involved staff and graduate students, and hopefully some of them will be honored in future years for their hard work in support of the graduate community in CSE."