Class of 2024: Julia Shapiro named Outstanding Master's Student for the College of Science
Julia Shapiro is the Virginia Tech College of Science Outstanding Master's Student. Photo courtesy of Julia Shapiro.
Name: Julia Shapiro
College: College of Science
Degree: M.S. in mathematics
Dissertation: Multishot Capacity of Adversarial Networks
Hometown: Buffalo, New York
Plans after graduation: Shapiro is diving into a mathematics Ph.D. program here at Virginia Tech and will be exploring either algebraic geometric codes or quantum codes with the Applied Algebra Research Group
Favorite Hokie memory: Sitting in the student section of a Virginia Tech football game in her first semester, taking pictures with the Hokie bird, and listening to “Enter Sandman.”
Fearless Hokie
Even from a young age, Julia Shapiro was comfortable in front of a crowd.
Zero stage fright combined with a love of math meant she did a lot of problems up at the blackboard.
“Sometimes I worried about my math being right, but I never worried about going up in front of people to solve the equations,” said Shapiro.
The math was usually right, too.
Research hacker
Shapiro’s proclivity and enthusiasm for the subject saw her graduate with honors in mathematics (and deliver the commencement speech) at her undergraduate institution. As a first-generation college student, she didn’t seriously consider graduate school until she discovered a subset of mathematics that kept her fascinated: coding theory.
“Virginia Tech really is the place to do coding theory — especially since I was interested in both codes and cryptography, and the applied algebra research group has both,” said Shapiro.
Coding theorists aim to improve data transmission and data storage using error-correcting codes. Cryptographers deal in secrets, designing algorithms to protect sensitive data like bank accounts and medical records.
But Shapiro didn’t find the coding and cryptography community at Virginia Tech hard to crack.
She immediately started working with other graduate students and a postdoctoral associate on what later became her thesis project: exploring the best ways to send and recover data over multiple uses of a server network that has been infiltrated by a malicious hacker.
Career kickstarter
Throughout the past two and a half years, Shapiro has completed two internships at the National Security Agency, conducted research with Virginia Tech’s National Security Institute, and was selected as a Commonwealth Cyber Initiative Cyber Innovation Scholar — twice.
The research results she generated as a scholar and an intern contribute to network efficiency, reliability, and resilience in applications from 5G/NextG communications to satellite networks to Internet of Things devices.
Spirit sharer
Tapping into her innate confidence in public settings, she has shared her research findings at poster sessions, conferences, symposia, and summits. In her final semester as a master’s student, Shapiro leveled up her skills by co-founding a graduate student seminar in the Mathematics Department to help other students develop presentation skills. She also became a co-organizer of the Postgraduate International Coding Theory Seminar, a virtual coding theory seminar for graduate students and postdoctoral researchers around the world.
Shapiro stands out as the Virginia Tech College of Science Outstanding Masters Student because she channels her enthusiasm and fearlessness into her research and encourages her community to do the same.
