Graduate Student Accolades

Alishia Stevenson (EMBA ‘26) from the University of Pittsburgh School of Business is among Poets&Quants’ 2026 Best and Brightest Executive MBAs across the globe. 

Sarah King (MBA/MPIA ’26), from the University of Pittsburgh School of Business, was named an MBA to Watch by Poets&Quants. This feature highlights some of the outstanding MBA students from schools worldwide.

William McKay, Zachary Spears and Amogh Vellore, students at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, are finalists for this year's Collegiate Inventors Competition, an annual contest that has rewarded innovations, discoveries and research by college and university students and their faculty advisors for more than 35 years.

Five students from the University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering’s Department of Bioengineering are recipients of the National Science Foundation’s prestigious Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) awards this fall.

The Pitt Business grad student team consisted of Jordyn White, (MBA/MID ’27), Faith Crawford (MS + BA ’27), Kanvi Sharma, (MBA ‘28) and Ben Bordenstein (MS ‘27).

Three Bioengineering PhD students at the Swanson School of Engineering will receive funding toward their studies in 2026, thanks to prestigious awards from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). 

Recent PhD Graduate Alireza Javadian Sabet (SCI ‘26G) received the Best Poster Award at the 12th International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2) held in Burlington, Vermont. 

Ahana Biswas, a fourth-year PhD student in information science at the University of Pittsburgh School of Computing and Information (SCI) and researcher in the PICSO Lab, attended the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) Graduate Workshop in Computational Social Science from May 24 through June 5, 2026. A highly selective and prestigious program, the workshop brings together a small cohort of graduate students from leading institutions to collaborate on interdisciplinary research.

Dijana Mujkanović (PhD '26) will begin a yearlong appointment as a Raphael Morrison Dorman Memorial Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs this fall. 

Ryan Lindner, a master’s student in the School of Public and International Affairs, earned a 2026 Boren Award for International Study. This summer, Lindner is using his fellowship to study Russian at the Novamova Language School in Tbilisi, Georgia.