2025 TXST Open Datathon Winners

2025 Datathon Competition

Student teams of 1 to 4 investigated open data related to a specified research challenge, formulated a research question, and developed insights, potential solutions, and recommendations based on their findings. Awards were presented in two categories: one for graduate students and one for undergraduate students. Special thanks to our campus partners, the TXST Center for Analytics and Data Science (CADS), the IDEA Center, and the Office of Data, Analytics & Institutional Research.

students planning project
Keynote speaker from orientation event
image of a circuit board shaped like a heart
Students consult with Xuan Zhou
Judges for datathon
students get snacks at orientation event
Provost speaks to datathon competitors
Dr. Visnak at awards ceremony
students giving presentation
student doing poster presentation
students listening to keynote
students look at dataverse site while listening to keynote

Winning Teams

Awards were presented for first through third place in two categories: Graduate Student Teams and Undergraduates.

Undergraduate First Place Winners

Winning team pictures with library director, Dr. Kelly Visnak and Provost Aswath
Winning team members with Dr. Kelly Visnak and Dr. Pranesh Aswath

The DataCats team of Insiya Raja, Jeeya Tanna, Luci Ngui, & Chioma Akaluso were awarded first place for their presentation: Identifying Higher Education Growth Hubs in Texas: What Drives Their Success?

Undergraduate Second Place Winner

2nd place winner
Arjun Gyawali with Dr. Kelly Visnak and Dr. Pranesh Aswath

Arjuan Gyawali presented his project: A Data-Driven Investigation of Gender Bias in Academic Promotions

Undergrad Third Place Winners

Bias Busters team with Dr. Kelly Visnak and Dr. Pranesh Aswath
The Bias Busters team members with Dr. Kelly Visnak and Dr. Pranesh Aswath

The Bias Busters team of Sumit Sah, Pujan Lamsal, Shreejal Bhattarai, and Samrakshan Rijal presented a project called: Behind the Ratings: Investigating Biases in the Student Evaluation on Rate My Professor.

Graduate Student First Place Winners

Winning team pictures with library director, Dr. Kelly Visnak and Provost Aswath
Winning team members with Dr. Kelly Visnak and Dr. Pranesh Aswath

The Dorminator team of Saksham Adhikari, Kusum Bhattarai Sharma, Ajay Bethireddy, and  Raghav Ojhi presented a project called: Optimizing Parking at TXST: Identifying Ideal Locations and Smart Allocation Strategies.

Graduate Student Second Place Winner

2nd place winners with Dr. Kelly Visnak and Dr. Pranesh Aswath
2nd Place winners with Dr. Kelly Visnak and Dr. Pranesh Aswath

The Bonsai team of Ragib Shahariar Ayon, Abdullah Al Safi, and Vaseem Ahmed presented a project titled: Suicide Prevalence in the US: Identifying Risk Factors and Taking Data Driven Decisions.

Graduate Student Third Place Winners

DataWiz team with Dr. Kelly Visnak and Dr. Pranesh Aswath
The DataWiz team members with Dr. Kelly Visnak and Dr. Pranesh Aswath

The DataWiz team of Heali Mehta, Raj Dudhat, Dikshya Gurung, and Marwa Azizi presented on Geospatial Insights for Spatial Distribution of Healthcare Facilities.

2025 Datathon Participants

Congratulations to participants who successfully completed the challenge and gave great presentations of their work at the 2025 TXST Open Datathon.

Grad Student Group Competitors

Ana Zia
Muazz Alam
Yahya BharaA
Zunain Nazir
Levina Owusu
Saumya Talla
Joseph Mallari
Sam Arshad
Mayesha Maliha Rahman Mithila
Md Shahriar Kabir
Yamini Gaddeti
Akshitha Addagtla

Undergraduate Student Group Competitors

Ashis Shrestha
Aayush Raj Sah
Ritiz Adhikari
Yugesh Bhattrai
Bala Parthasarathy
Swathi Vallabhaneni
Ashley Villareal
Angela Noronha
Nikola  Markovic
Troy Eloff
Pilar Valdez
Prashant Panta
CJ Faircloth
Ryan Fitzgerald
Sapnil Basnet
Saurav Rijal

2025 TXST Open Datathon Projects

Find projects and datasets from the 2025 competition in our Dataverse repository