2017 UG Commencement Program

27 Samantha E. Epstein , a criminal justice major, is from Linwood, New Jersey. She has been a member of the Alpha Chi Honors Society and the Delta Epsilon Iota Academic Honor Society since 2015. In 2016, she attended the American Society of Criminology Annual Meeting under the support of Kendra Gentry, Ph.D. In 2017, she attended the Southeastern Writing Center Association Conference under the supervision of Kevin Dvorak, Ph.D. Epstein also attended the Conference on College Composition and Communication 2017 Annual Convention under the guidance of Juliette Kitchens, Ph.D., and Kelly Concannon, Ph.D. Epstein has been a member of Phi Sigma Sigma sorority since 2013, a member of the Panhellenic Council from 2015 to 2016, and a member of the President’s 64 since 2016. She served as the site leader for the international service trip to Jamaica last May, has been on the Dean’s List since 2013, and received the Siegel Family Criminal Justice Endowed Scholarship for the 2016–2017 academic year. She works in the Writing Center at the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences as a writing fellow and acts as student coordinator of daily operations. Epstein plans to attend the University of Massachusetts—Lowell to earn a Doctor of Philosophy in Criminal Justice and Criminology in the fall. C ollege of E ngineering and C omputing Priscila Dessire Reyes , a double major in computer science and mathematics, is from Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. She was a student in the Farquhar Honors College and received the Distinguished Student Scholarship in 2013. Reyes has been a member of the Delta Epsilon Iota Honor Society since 2014, and coauthored an academic paper with Alvaro Escobar, M.S., titled “Metrics for Effectiveness of E-Learning Objects in Software Engineering Education.” The paper was presented at the Southeast IEEE Conference in 2013. She also worked with Vehbi Paksoy, Ph.D., and fellow student Ly Nguyen on an independent research project titled “An Algebro-Geometric Approach to Reverse Engineering the Lac Operon in E. coli.” This project was also presented at NSU’s Undergraduate Student Symposium. In addition, Reyes interned for several months in 2016 as a software engineer at Modernizing Medicine, and served as president of the Nomatics math organization from 2014 to 2015. While attending NSU, Reyes was a supplemental instructor for discrete mathematics and served as a mathematics and computer science tutor at the Tutoring and Testing Center. She also received the President’s Scholarship and the Dean’s Scholarship all four years at NSU. Reyes plans to work in her field as a software engineer for a couple of years before returning to NSU to earn her master’s degree in computer science.