Recognition Programs

Student Employee of the Year Awards

Student Employee of the Year (SEOTY) is celebrated every April during National Student Employment Week and is sponsored by the National Student Employment Association (NSEA).

Congratulation of all the 2022-2023 Nominees!

The Student Employment Office celebrated 42 student nominees along with their supervisors on April 12, 2023.

Jiarui Chen ’23, a data science major from Jiangyin, China, has been named the 2023 Student Employee of the Year for Technology and Innovation by the National Student Employment Association. The awards, which are also given in the categories of community service, critical thinking, diversity, and leadership, recognize the outstanding contributions and achievements of students who work while attending college.

Chen, who is also the University’s undergraduate Student Employee of the Year, is a research assistant at the University’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute. His work for CTSI involved analyzing the social media data associated with electronic cigarettes and other tobacco products and their associations with health conditions and symptoms, as well as public opinion on the ban of flavored electronic cigarettes. As a student employee, Chen had a research paper published and was able to present his findings during the poster session of the annual meeting of the Western New York-based Center for Research on Flavored Tobacco.

“The job provided me with exposure to advanced machine learning and natural language processing techniques that are beyond the scope of regular course material,” Chen told NSEA. “It also prepared me for a research mindset as I move on to pursue graduate-level education.”

The University’s Graduate Student Employee of the Year is Olivia Waysack ’22, ’23M from Las Vegas. The epidemiology master’s student is a research assistant for ROC HOME, a community-based home visiting research project, in the Department of Environmental Medicine. This study partners with the City of Rochester and Silent Spring Institute to evaluate the influence of housing rehabilitation and resident engagement on exposures to semivolatile organic compounds (SVOCs), lead, and allergens. Waysack has recruited 86 participants and collected dust samples and surveyed residents on more than 120 home visits in Rochester.

From left to right: Dongmei Li (Clinical and Translational Science Institute) and Jiarui Chen. Olivia Waysack and Katrina Korfmacher (Environmental Medicine).