OURS National Scholarships

Mariel Aquino : Critical Language Scholarship

Mariel Aquino is a fourth-year Data Science major with a concentration in Linguistics. She has always enjoyed traveling and studying foreign languages and will combine this with her interests in natural language processing, machine learning, and machine translation as a full-time NLP engineer next year. Her past three semesters of linguistics researchin Ndengeleko, an endangered Bantu language spoken in Tanzania, developed her interest in East African languages. As businesses expand to areas such as Southeast Asia and East Africa, Mariel plans to take what she’s learned in the program to inform the technical product design process with greater linguistic and cultural awareness in emerging markets.