Senior Eric Brown, a computer science major, received a scholarship to attend Dartmouth College for his master’s.
“[It] was late March when I just opened the email, and I was like no way, it just really took me by surprise, I was not expecting it,” Brown said.
Brown said that for his future career, he “would love to go into medical cybersecurity.” He was inspired to go into computer science and cybersecurity after taking classes with KSC Computer Science Department Chair Wei Lu.
“I took [Lu’s] machine learning class and during that class we did a machine learning project that focused on cybersecurity and that was the start of it,” Brown said. “[Lu] eventually offered me a position in his lab, which I took him up on.”
Brown published three research papers, one from the machine learning class and another one during the summer of 2024. One focused on machine learning and artificial intelligence and the other two were medical-based.
“One of them was an Alzheimer’s project, so it was pain detection for Alzheimer’s patients, because they can’t advocate for themselves,” Brown said. “And the other one was a survey-based one. Ideally, you’d just fill out a survey with a bunch of questions and then it was used for diabetes prediction to predict if you were at risk.”
Brown has also presented his research in various local places, such as the annual Keene State Academic Excellence Conference, the University of New Hampshire and the New Hampshire IDeA Network of Biomedical Research Excellence (NH-INBRE), which according to the Dartmouth Geisel School of Medicine website, is funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
“At the NH-INBRE annual meeting, I did an oral presentation to about 200 to 300 people, so that was really awesome,” Brown said.
In addition to local and regional presentations, Brown had the opportunity to present his research abroad.
“One of the international [conferences] was [in] Japan… and then the next one was [in] 2025, which was in Barcelona, Spain, and that was for Alzheimer’s pain detection,” Brown said.
Lu described Brown to be an extremely strong student in Keene State’s Computer Science program.
“I believe [Brown] is one of the most capable and self-motivated undergraduate students I work with,” Lu said. “He’s a nice human, you know what it’s like as an undergraduate, it’s not easy.” Lu mentioned Brown’s leadership within the program as he served as the president of the Computer Science Honor Society and was also a teaching assistant.
For his time in the department, Brown received the Ron Tourgee Award, which, according to an article published by the Foster’s Daily Democrat, “was established in 2005 to honor a student for professional promise and excellent scholastic achievement in the computer sciences.”
Lu said he is proud of Brown’s dedication towards his academics and wishes him the best of luck in the future.
“I just want to see him keep doing the cool stuff that we were doing when we did the medical cybersecurity lab,” Lu said. “I’m pretty confident in him.”
Nicole Dumont can be contacted at
ndumont@kscequinox.com
