Computer Science Student Sammy Lesner Receives College's Highest Undergraduate Research Honor
When computer science senior Sammy Lesner joined a research lab through UC Santa Barbara's Early Research Scholars Program, she quickly discovered a passion for research that would shape the rest of her undergraduate career.
Three years later, Lesner was awarded the College of Engineering's 2026 Matthew Tirrell Award for Distinction in Undergraduate Research, one of the college's highest honors for graduating seniors. Named after former dean Matthew Tirrell, the award recognizes exceptional promise and excellence in undergraduate research.
Research Across Multiple Fields
Lesner's research experience spanned two distinct areas of computer science.
Working with Professor Tao Yang and graduate student mentor Parker Carlson, she conducted research in information retrieval systems and scalable machine learning. Building on a graduate course project, she co-developed a faster K-means guided partitioning method for large vector datasets. Her evaluation demonstrated performance improvements that were two orders of magnitude faster than classical approaches on the team's test datasets. The work was accepted to ACM SIGIR 2026, the premier international conference on information retrieval, with Lesner serving as a co-first author.
At the same time, Lesner conducted research in Professor Maryam Majedi's Embedded Ethics Lab, where she explored how search-engine design can contribute to the spread of misinformation. Her project addressed a gap in computer science education: while students often learn how search engines work technically, they are rarely encouraged to examine their broader societal impact. Lesner designed an educational module that teaches both the technical foundations of search engines and their ethical implications. The work was accepted for publication at SIGCSE 2026, one of the leading conferences in computer science education.
Following graduation, Lesner will remain at UC Santa Barbara to pursue a master's degree in computer science before applying to PhD programs focused on information retrieval and systems architecture.