Penn State Great Valley hosted its annual LionCage competition on Nov. 14, with entrepreneurs from the Greater Philadelphia region pitching their start-up companies and competing for prize money. This event was the culmination of a series of six smaller competitions held throughout the past year, with panel discussions and mentoring sessions to help local founders refine their business plans and pitches.
Knowing how competitive summer internships could be, graduate student Faizan Raza submitted hundreds of applications even before he began his master’s degree in data analytics at Penn State. Out of 14,000 applicants, he landed one of 30 internship spots at cybersecurity firm Zscaler and built an AI-powered service that automated 90% of data processing tasks for his team.
What can technologists do to help artificial intelligence (AI) comply with ethical values for the public good? A team, including researchers from Penn State, explored ways that blockchain — the technology behind cryptocurrency — could help enforce ethical boundaries for AI systems.
When Bharat Sharma was accepted to Penn State Great Valley’s Master of Data Analytics program, he said he remembered feeling joy that gave way to uncertainty about how he would afford graduate school. A scholarship fueled his studies and his research, helping him use technology to make people’s jobs easier.
Data analytics alum Rahul Vemuri honed his skills in organizing large datasets predictive modeling to make sound business decisions. He showcased his skills during an industry partnership project and internship with PQ LLC. His talent in uncovering patterns and insights from the data impressed PQ’s leadership, leading to a full-time position as a data engineer specializing in market forecasting.
A team of Penn State Great Valley professors and students studied how well large language models, such as ChatGPT and Claude, can solve data science coding challenges. The researchers presented their work at the International Conference on Mining Software Repositories and won the Distinguished Paper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Software Engineering.
Six Penn State Great Valley students presented four research projects at the 2025 Graduate Exhibition, hosted by the Fox Graduate School. This event offered the students a professional development experience with opportunities to network and practice their communication skills as they explained their projects, the methods they used and the impact of their work in areas ranging from geographically targeted opioid interventions to affordable cybersecurity practices for nonprofit organizations.
Penn State Great Valley has again earned national recognition for academic excellence, securing top rankings in the 2025 U.S. News & World Report "Best Online Programs" list for engineering management, software and systems engineering and IT programs.
Two graduate students in Penn State Great Valley’s data analytics program, Praneeth Sunkavalli and Jainil Kakka, won second place for their research poster at a recent symposium hosted by the Penn State Institute for Computational and Data Sciences. For their research project, they used machine learning to analyze event data from soccer games to measure the success rates of a defensive tactic called "pressing," when players pressure their opponents in an attempt to regain the ball.
Anivesh Sinha is one of the graduate research assistants working with a team of faculty and students from five Commonwealth Campuses, with funding from a University Presidential Public Impact Research Award, to help Pennsylvania nonprofit organizations improve their cybersecurity practices.
