The Summer Research Scholars (SRS) program provides support for students engaged in collaborative research under the guidance of W&L faculty. It is designed to foster the development of discipline-specific research skills, encourage active knowledge acquisition, and spark student interest in scholarly inquiry.
Here are the 2026 Computer Science SRS students, along with their faculty mentors and summaries of their research:
Professor Sana Habib:
This summer, Professor Habib had three SRS students: Saad Ahmed Khan Ghori ’27, Slsabil (Zazo) Hassan ’28 and Taeyun Kim ’29.
Research Synopsis:
This summer’s research projects explore critical challenges in cybersecurity, privacy, and trustworthy computing—from securing future 5G/6G network architectures and protecting user privacy in cloud-native systems to developing hands-on educational tools for teaching secure software development. Together, these projects contribute to creating more secure, resilient, and privacy-conscious digital technologies.
Saad Ahmed Khan Ghori ‘27
Saad has been working on Metadata Leakage in 5G-Based Service Architectures: A Cloud-Native Measurement and Analysis. His research examines how metadata generated within cloud-native 5G networks may inadvertently reveal sensitive information. By measuring and analyzing these potential information leaks, the project seeks to better understand privacy risks in modern telecommunications infrastructure and identify opportunities to strengthen user privacy.
Slsabil (Zazo) Hassan ‘28
Slsabil has been developing the Security & Privacy Dojo, an interactive educational platform that teaches secure programming through hands-on exercises based on core data structures. By identifying and fixing realistic vulnerabilities in code, students gain practical experience with secure software development while learning the security and privacy challenges that can arise from incorrect implementations.
Taeyun Kim ‘29
Taeyun has been conducting research on Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) at the Service Layer: Trust Graph Analysis for Federated FutureG Networks. The project explores trust relationships in next-generation mobile networks, investigating how service providers can securely communicate and collaborate in future federated 5G and 6G environments. The research aims to identify potential trust vulnerabilities and contribute to the design of more secure and resilient network architectures.
The students have made excellent progress on their projects so far, and it has been exciting to see their ideas develop over the course of the summer.
Professor Sara Sprenkle:
This summer, Professor Sprenkle mentored three SRS students: Alan Liu ’28, Takunda Mawere ’28 and Danilo Sindric ’29. These students worked on The Ancient Graffiti Project (AGP) which is a digital scholarly resource for searching, studying and analyzing ancient Roman inscriptions.
Alan Liu ‘28
Alan’s research investigates how to accurately and efficiently represent the archeological sites of Pompeii and Herculaneum on a digital map that grants access to 3500+ different types of graffiti. He worked on developing more features for AGP’s mapping such as seamless canvas rendering, permanent labels, map aesthetics, and numerous bug fixes and simplification of the development code. Effectively, the maps received a complete overhaul that significantly boosts the productivity of the user skimming through dozens of graffiti.
Takunda Mawere ’28
Takunda’s research project involves developing new features to continue improving the AGP website. His work this summer was mainly focused on improving the search functionality. He upgraded the system from Elasticsearch 7 to Elasticsearch 8/9 API. Takunda also leveraged the new API to improve the pipeline for searching and sorting results.
Danilo Sindric ‘29
Danilo’s research this summer began with improving the filtering system on the main AGP website. He then transitioned to the VESTA project, where he worked on a variety of development tasks. Danilo’s primary contributions included building an evaluation tool that enables comparisons with similar digital humanities projects, as well as developing several analysis tools.
