Mayank Lahiri, a PhD student in the Computational Population Biology Lab, has received the Provost's Award for his project on automatic identification of zebras from photographs, a project he has started in Kenya as a student in the Field Computational Population Biology course this semester. He will use the award to go back to Kenya to validate, fine-tune, and deploy the system where it is most needed: in the field, so the nature conservancy staff, field assistants, researchers, and scouts can use it to do their job studying and saving zebras.

Mayank's PhD thesis is on prediction of dynamic social networks and he has received the 2009-2010 Dean's Scholar Award for his research.