Franklin's Sloka Sudhin awarded Goldwater Scholarship

Sloka Sudhin is one of three University of Georgia students among the 441 undergraduates from across the nation to be recognized as Barry Goldwater Scholars this spring. They have earned the highest undergraduate award of its type for the fields of mathematics, engineering and natural sciences. Sudhin, a Foundation Fellow and Stamps Scholar from Marietta, Georgia, is majoring in data science and applied mathematics in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences. Since 1995, 70 students at the University of Georgia have received the Goldwater Scholarship, which recognizes exceptional sophomores and juniors across the United States:

Sudhin plans to earn a Ph.D. in applied math or computer science. She wants to conduct research at the intersection of optimization algorithms and predictive modeling through complex computer experiments. Her goal is to translate real-world phenomena into mathematical problems and apply powerful theoretical results in new ways to find the best algorithms.

“I’m interested in researching computer experiments, which serve as simulations when a physical experiment is difficult or even impossible to conduct in real life,” she said. “With applications from aerospace engineering, to mapping brain activity, to traffic control, to weather modeling, it’s a vast field that encompasses what I love so much about statistics: getting to play in the backyard of other research fields while applying my own skills and expertise to their problems. The support of the Goldwater Foundation validates that the work I find so important and fulfilling deserves to continue to be explored and researched.”

Sudhin’s current research projects started in August 2022 through a directed study on generalized linear models under the guidance of Abhyuday Mandal, professor of statistics at UGA. As she increased her skills and took a graduate-level machine learning course, in fall 2023 she moved to studying the applications of particle swarm optimization with Mandal and Joshua Lukemire, assistant research professor of biostatistics and bioinformatics at Emory University. She is now developing a global optimization technique for identifying efficient designs, called d-QPSO, with both Mandal and Lukemire. She was able to expand on her research in 2024 as a CURO Summer Fellow.

As president of Codehub, she develops weekly Python and exploratory data analysis lesson plans to support students’ personal projects in the School of Computing. She has previously served as an undergraduate teaching assistant for software development under the UGA School of Computing. Sudhin received the Kossack Prize for excelling in a calculus competition and the Hollingsworth Award for being a top-performing student in upper-division math classes at UGA. Her first research experience was as a data analytics intern with scoutSMART, a college recruiting analytics startup company in Atlanta. This position began in high school, and she completed her research on special teams positions and their recruiting changes in October 2022.

Congratulations to all three students on this prestigious scholarship support.

Image: Sloka Sudhin (Photo by Stephanie Schupska)