College of Engineering News Room

Sayde King Selected for GEM PhD Fellowship by MIT Lincoln Laboratory

Sayde King, a third-year doctoral student in the USF Department of Computer Science and Engineering, has been awarded a 2022-2023 National GEM Consortium PhD fellowship. With sponsorship from MIT Lincoln Laboratory, King will receive a stipend of $20,000 along with a summer internship.  

As a member of the Cyber Identity and Behavior Research (CIBeR) Lab, King is advised by Department of Computer Science and Engineering Assistant Professor Tempestt Neal. King’s primary research interests are behavioral analysis and automated deception detection using gesture recognition, emotion recognition and wireless sensing. Working with Neal as both an REU and PhD student, King collaborated on several interdisciplinary projects and wrote three conference papers as well as a journal article.

The National GEM Consortium is a network of Fortune 500 corporations, national laboratories, and top research institutions, including USF, that identifies and recruits more than 1,000 undergraduate students, graduate students, and working professionals for admission into advanced degree programs at the nation's elite universities. Founded in 1976 at the University of Notre Dame, the GEM Consortium seeks to enhance the value of the nation's human capital by increasing the participation of underrepresented groups at the master's and doctoral levels in engineering and science. Since 2015, 14 USF College of Engineering students have been awarded GEM fellowships.

In addition to the GEM Fellowship, King is a recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation University Center of Exemplary Mentoring (UCEM) graduate scholarship. Last summer, she participated in a virtual internship with the National Security Directorate at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) Disruptive Technology group. King applied machine learning and deep learning techniques on mass spectrometry data to learn and predict underlying patterns between spectra, instruments, and energy. In 2020, she was selected to attend the Computing Research Association Cohort Workshop for Women focused on building mentoring relationships and developing peer networks.

King has also served as a research assistant, teaching assistant, and graduate assistant for the NSF funded S-STEM Flit-Path scholarship program within the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. The program supports academically talented undergraduates with financial need in information technology, computer science, computer engineering, and cybersecurity. Recently, King was a guest on the Modern Figures Podcast to share her career journey and how she navigates the challenges of graduate school.