Outstanding Faculty Mentor of Masters Students

The Outstanding Faculty Mentor of Master’s Students Award is presented each Spring at the May Doctoral Hooding and Commencement Ceremony. This award honors one-on-one mentoring of students receiving a master’s degree through the direction of a thesis, supervision of a student’s research and creative activity, and/or oversight of a student’s internship, exhibition or final professional paper. All members of the graduate faculty who mentor students to the completion of the degree are eligible to be nominated by their chair, colleagues or graduate students. Assistant Professor Sabur Baidya from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering is this year’s recipient.

Dr. Sabur Baidya joined UofL in 2021 as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering department. He is also a core faculty at the Louisville Automation and Robotics Research Institute (LARRI). His responsibilities include multidimensional research, teaching graduate and undergraduate courses, and internal and professional services. He is investigating several research projects (including Co-PI on two NSF grants), mentoring several undergraduate, MS and PhD students and publishing impactful research papers.

Dr. Baidya is an associate editor of IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters and Associate Chair of the IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Autonomous Ground Vehicles. He serves as track-chair for the ACM Symposium on Applied Computing. He is an active member of IEEE and serves in IEEE standardization committees.

Prior to joining UofL, he was a Postdoctoral Scholar in Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of California, San Diego, and at the same time was a visiting researcher in the WINLAB at Rutgers University and worked in several industries including, Nokia Bell Labs, Cisco Systems, and IBM.

Dr. Baidya received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of California, Irvine in 2019 and M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Dallas in 2013. 

The master’s student who nominated Dr. Baidya’s for this award said, “I can state without hesitation that Dr. Baidya has been the most transformative mentor of my academic journey. His guidance has shaped not only my research trajectory but also my professional identity, leadership skills, and long-term aspirations toward a career in academia.”  Dr. Baidya’s chair wrote a letter praising his mentoring of master’s students, saying “While doctoral advising often receives significant institutional visibility, Dr. Baidya has been intentional and strategic in elevating the master's student experience to the same level of intellectual rigor, opportunity, and professional preparation. His mentorship model integrates innovative pedagogy, research immersion, real-world engagement, and individualized career guidance in a manner that is both systematic and deeply student-centered.”