Computer science undergraduate receives honorable mention for national research award

Adrian Faust, a senior in the Department of Computer Science, has received an honorable mention for the Computing Research Association (CRA) Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award.

The highly competitive award - sponsored by Sandia National Laboratories and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory - recognizes undergraduate students in North American colleges and universities who show outstanding research potential in an area of computing research.

Faust, who works with Professor Lydia Tapia, specializes in the highly in-demand area of artificial intelligence, and specifically adapting robots trained in simulations to unseen experiences in the real world. As he explains, while training in simulation is much quicker and more cost-effective, robots must be able to adapt when deployed, as simulations do not perfectly model the real world. His work has been published in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), a top robotics journal, and he won Best Presentation at the Southwest Robotics Symposium 2025.

And on top of his work in AI and computer science, he is also a member of UNM's lacrosse team.

Faust's interest in computer science and AI specifically is no surprise. His mother, Aleksandra Faust, received a Ph.D. from UNM's Department of Computer Science, and in fact, had Tapia as her advisor more than a decade ago.

Aleksandra is now chief AI officer at Genesis Molecular AI, where she leads AI-driven drug discovery research and development, and engineering. She previously held a variety of AI jobs at Google, including director of research at Google DeepMind, a co-founder of reinforcement learning research at Google Brain, and being involved in the development of machine learning for self-driving car planning and controls for Waymo.

Adrian said that UNM was a natural choice for him, considering that he grew up immersed in the culture of computer science and UNM research (additionally, his father a former software engineer). A student with his credentials could have chosen to study computer science anywhere, but for him, UNM offered some strong advantages.

One advantage was that he could get to know most of his faculty, since the faculty ranks in the department are fairly small and tight-knit, yet the research is cutting-edge and has the prestige of an R1 and flagship institution.

"UNM is both big and small," he said.

UNM also encourages undergraduates to work with graduate students and faculty on research projects, with ample opportunity to publish, present research and attend professional conferences.

"I was always interested in doing research, and at UNM, I could get started quick," he said.

For him, "quick" meant his freshman year, which is when he joined the Tapia lab. And right away, he was doing the kind of research and scholarship reserved at many institutions for graduate students.

Although computer science is widely known for being a challenging subject, Faust said that being involved in undergraduate research helped enhance his learning.

"Doing research early helped with classes, in understanding how everything fits together," Faust said. "What we were learning in classes I was also putting into practice in the lab. Research has helped it all make sense."

Faust said he plans to earn a Ph.D. in computer science, continue his studies in AI, and is eagerly awaiting news from the applications he has submitted to institutions across the country.

With AI now a national priority, the progress in this area is rapidly evolving, and just as his mother did in her research 15 years ago, Faust will witness what is sure to be some incredible progress in the field in the next several years. Although he is not sure where his career path will eventually lead, he is looking forward to being at the forefront of those advances.

"It's hard to tell where the field will go, but I think it's safe to say that automation will advance, as will human-robot interactions," he said. "There are a lot of applications that can help people, such as medical rehabilitation and therapy, but it's important that we keep in mind all of the ethical concerns. AI definitely needs to earn trust and be deployed safely."