68 MASEEH COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING AND COMPUTER SCIENCE Alejandro Castaneda ALEJANDRO CASTANEDA is graduating Summa Cum Laude with a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science and a minor in Physics. He attended Portland State as a Western Undergraduate Exchange recipient. Growing up in Las Vegas, Nevada, Castaneda had experienced about 18 year’s worth of heat and sun when he decided he was ready for a change. Alejandro was naturally drawn to an utterly new climate and fell in love with a city all too familiar with cloudy days, Portland, Oregon. Throughout Castaneda’s four years at PSU, he picked up interests in countless subjects. Favorites among them were natural language processing, algorithmic bias, model interpretability and UI/UX design. In the same four years, he found himself involved with We in Computer Science, the Computer Science department’s diversity and empowerment group, as president, vice president and mentorship program director. Castaneda completed a fellowship with Code2040, an organization empowering Black and Latinx technologists, and a mentorship with Out in Tech, an organization for LGBTQ+ tech leaders. In the future, Castaneda says, “find me as a software engineer in New York! I’ll likely be at the nearest pizzeria gobbling down a slice.” STUDENT SPEAKERS Katherine Keeling KATHERINE KEELING is graduating with a master’s degree in civil engineering with a focus in transportation. She is a two-time recipient of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Fellowship Award, a two-time NITC Scholar, and first place winner of the ASCE Region Eight Student Essay and Technical Presentation. Throughout her undergraduate and graduate studies at PSU, she has been a leader in student clubs such as Students in Transportation Engineering and Planning (STEP-ITE) and Chi Epsilon (the civil engineering honor society). All while working as a research assistant, she is a proud member of the Graduate Employees Union. She looks forward to a career in advancing active transportation modes such as walking, bicycling, transit and e-scooters; and has spent the past year putting advocacy into action as the proud nanny of the Lewis family, teaching three young boys how to ride bicycles and/or towing them around on the back of her cargo bike. Keeling’s most memorable experience is helping the PSU team reach a first place victory in the 2019 Bill Kloos Traffic Bowl — a silly jeopardy-style trivia competition hosted by Portlandarea transportation professionals. Her proudest accomplishment is arranging for 30 PSU students to receive scholarships to attend the Transportation Research Board’s 100th Annual Meeting, a nationally recognized research conference which profoundly shaped her own experience as a transportation student. She would like to thank Doctors Clifton, Figliozzi, Monsere, and Kothuri for inviting her to opportunities in research; and to her parents, John and Wanda, her beloved abuela, Sam, “Pizza Club,” Rachel, and Bad Bop Brian for their unfailing support.
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