Logo: University of Southern California

Student Recognition Awards for Viterbi Trio

Grads from Computer Science, AME and ISE Receive Honors for Service
Eric Mankin
May 05, 2008 — Christopher Leung, John McArthur and Ramnath Shenoy are 2008 Viterbi recipients of USC Student Recognition Awards. SRAs honor students who have distinguished themselves not just academically, but by exceptional service to the university and public. 

USC Student Affairs bestows the honors, which were formerly known as the Senior Recognition and Graduate Student recognition awards. They "seek to honor USC's most outstanding students," nominated by peers, on the basis of detailed information about nominees' campus careers.

Chris Leung
Leung, who will receive his M.S. degree in computer science May 16, created Project:Possibility, mobilizing classmates to create open source software to aid the handicapped, and bringing in both expertise and financial support from IT companies including  Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, and Mozilla. He began the project while working at JPL, and continued it while in the CS department at USC, expanding it into a spring competition, "the Semester Project" in which teams competed for cash  prizes put up by industry. The CS department is now considering giving academic credit for such competitions. Leung was also selected for the USC Stevens Institute for Innovation student advisory board. As the CS Student Senator at the USC Graduate Association, he was designated "Outstanding Senator."   In his spare time, he developed and launched a new website for the USC International Students Assembly.

McArthur, a new Ph.D. in AME, was the finance vice president for the Engineering Grad Student Association. His speciality is fluid dynamics, working with Professor Geoff Spedding, whose work on bat wing dynamics has attracted worldwide attention. McArthur has co-authored four journal or conference papers with Spedding, and made another seven presentations on his own. A national
with laser
John McArthur
guardsman, he is also captain and of the USC men's soccer club team, a USC trialthlon team member, and winner of six scholarships or honor awards.  An indefatigable organizer, he has staged or helped stage dozens of events, ranging from ice cream socials to the Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering LaTeX tutorial.

Shenoy maintained a 3.7 average in his work for his forthcoming M.S. degree while serving as Vice-Captain of the Trojan Cricket Club and winning its MVP award. He also was the lead singer/dancer for the Indian Performing Arts group Anubhavam, helped the Daniel J. Epstein Department to a student recruitment record, while serving as student
Ramnath Shenoy
life chair on the Graduate and Professional Student Senate and the Industrial and Systems Engineering Senator to the Engineering Graduate Student Association.

McArthur generously said:  "I also hope that you include Karthikeyan Chockalingam in your article. He is the president of the Engineering Graduate Student Association, and took charge in January. He was the senator for Civil Engineering before that, and he organized a job fair and industry relations night last year as senator. He also organized the first Engineering Idol last year, and helped stage the event again this year. The Dancing with the Engineers event was also his idea and it was held in Bovard Auditorium, probably the biggest event of EGSA history, and probably
Karthikeyan Chockalingam receives  2006 CE TA Award from CEE chair Jean-Pierre Bardet.
the biggest event ever planned by any graduate student with no real assistance from staff members. He really has been a driving force behind EGSA and the success that Ram, Chris, and I have had."