25 Terps in AI to Brag About at Your Next Dinner Party
25 Terps in AI to Brag About at Your Next Dinner Party
If you use the internet, chances are you’ve been hearing about artificial intelligence (AI) for the past year–LLMs, generative AI, machine learning, oh my! But what you may not know is that the topic has existed for over 50 years at the University of Maryland, encompassing a wide range of fields. As a Terp, there’s much to be proud of in the realm of AI–the university leads the charge as a top 10 public university for AI in the classroom, through cutting-edge research and beyond. When students graduate and join a global network of more than 431,000 Terps, they’re continuing to lead and innovate in this space.
Here’s 25 alums working across the field of AI to impress your friends at upcoming dinner parties, tailgates and more:
Sweta Agrawal Ph.D. ’23 and Eleftheria Briakou Ph.D. ’23 now work as research scientists at Google, where they develop the AI translation tools that let millions of people communicate across languages every day.
Naji Alani M.Eng. ’16, Ph.D. won the American Chemistry Council award for using AI to advance safety and performance practice for his company, Dow, which advances the performance of environmental operations in the chemical industry.
Dave Baggett ’92 is founder and CEO of INKY, an award-winning cybersecurity startup in College Park that uses AI and machine learning tools to help companies fight spam, phishing and malware.
Akash Magoon ’18 co-founded and serves as CEO of Adonis, which uses artificial intelligence to bridge the gap of one of the medical sector’s most overlooked issues: automating insurance company and health care provider payment collection processes. He stays connected to UMD and has served as a speaker at the EnTERPreneur Conference and as a judge for the Pitch Dingman Competition.
Julia Brown ’13 is head of Data Strategy & AI at Blackrock, developing next-generation devices in health care and neurotechnology, from brain-controlled smart glasses to seizure detectors and more.
Brian Calvert, Ph.D. ’15 is co-founder of startup Graft, where he is on a mission to make a difference by making AI more accessible.
Rebecca Delaney '20, M.Ed. '21 won a National Council for Exceptional Children (CEC) award for her use of AI to support the inclusion of students with disabilities as a Howard County Public Schools System teacher.
Allyson Ettinger Ph.D. '18 is a research scientist at Ai2, which is building breakthrough AI to address climate science, agriculture, food security, wildfire management and more.
Jordan Goldstein '94 is president of global design firm Gensler, at the forefront of using AI in the architectural design field.
Ari Gross MS '86 is founder, Chairman and Chief Innovation Officer of TRUE, a leader in intelligent automation and decisioning software for the mortgage industry, where he focuses on advancing TRUE’s AI strategy and accelerating research and product initiatives.
Rui Yin Ph.D. ’24 is a scientist and team leader at an AI antibody design company named Absci, working to engineer better biologics to target “the undruggables,” proteins associated with the progression of various illnesses that have staved off drug therapies against them because of their size, complexity or other problematic structures.
Valerie Hyde M.S. ’05, Ph.D. ’07 is head of the North American Artificial Intelligence Customer Engineering team at Google Cloud, where she taps into cutting-edge technologies to take business enterprises into the future.
Grace Hynes '17 is a customer services manager at Sensory, Inc, an AI speech recognition company.
Brooke Larson Ph.D. '13 co-founded Rime Labs, a startup working to create more natural-sounding AI voices.
Adam Liter Ph.D. '22 is a staff machine learning scientist at Glassdoor, where people can search millions of jobs, salaries and company reviews.
P. Aaron Lott Ph.D. ’08 works for the NASA Quantum Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (QuAIL), the space agency’s hub for assessing and advancing the potential of quantum computers to impact computational challenges faced by the agency in the decades to come.
Shayan Zadeh M.S. ’02 is using AI to improve banking, finance, hospital ORs and more as founder and CEO of Leap Rail. He has supported future generations of Terps as a judge for the EnTERPreneur Business Expo with the Startup Shell and a past member of the University of Maryland Alumni Association Board of Governors.
Daniel Priest MBA ’98 is Chief AI Officer for PricewaterhouseCoopers, one of the four largest accounting firms in the world.
Debanjan Saha M.S. ’93, Ph.D. ’95 is CEO of DataRobot, where he is driving the global expansion of the company’s cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) platform.
Sander Schulhoff ’24 is the Co-Founder & CEO of Learn Prompting, an open-source platform that teaches people how to use AI with more than 1.2 million users.
Samantha Snyder Ph.D. '25 created wearable shoe insoles with sensors to measure knee osteoarthritis risk factors, using machine learning to gather valuable data.
Mark Urbanczyk ’02 is the AI & Data Engineering Leader for Government & Public Services at Deloitte Consulting, focused on helping the firm’s clients achieve mission and business results with emerging AI technologies and data driven innovation.
Adam Wenchel ’99 is co-founder and CEO of Arthur, a performance company featuring next-generation products designed to simplify deployment, monitoring and management of AI models to help businesses and others use AI efficiently and safely.
Yu'an Yang Ph.D. '22 is a machine learning engineer at Apple, working on building new experiences into the hardware and software of Apple devices.
As you can see, Terps across industries, from pharmaceuticals to teaching, are shaping the future of AI. To learn more (yes, there’s even more!) about AI at Maryland, visit ai.umd.edu.
