The University of Kentucky Alumni Association’s Lyman T. Johnson Alumni Constituency Group hosted the 34th annual Lyman T. Johnson Awards Luncheon on Oct. 17, in the Gatton Student Center Grand Ballroom.
Held during UK Homecoming, the event honors alumni and students from each academic college who embody the spirit and accomplishments of Lyman T. Johnson, recognizing those who have positively impacted the lives of others and their communities.
Each academic college selects alumni to receive Lyman T. Johnson Torch of Excellence Awards for outstanding achievement and students to receive Torch Bearer Awards for academic excellence and service to others.
The keynote speaker was Robert Milligan, a retired lieutenant colonel from the Kentucky State Police (KSP). A trailblazer in law enforcement and a 1987 graduate of UK’s College of Education, Milligan was the first Black officer to rise to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the KSP. His distinguished career includes decades of public service, leadership in state government and continued advocacy for excellence in law enforcement.
The 2025 Pigman College of Engineering recipients are featured below.
Nathaniel Hudson received his Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Kentucky in 2022.
He serves as an assistant professor of computer science at the Illinois Institute of Technology based in Chicago. Prior to that, he worked as a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Chicago with a joint appointment at Argonne National Laboratory.
As a professor, he studies decentralized machine learning systems (e.g., federated learning) with the goal of using the full computing continuum to train and deploy AI from the network edge to the cloud.
He has developed one of the first federated learning frameworks with native support for hierarchical networks, AI placement and scheduling algorithms for edge computing systems, and new methods for interpreting large language models.
His work has been applied to various domains, such as materials science, smart city use cases, and rural applications.
Joshna Kurra graduated with a bachelor's degree in computer science from the University of Kentucky. She is in her second semester of graduate school, studying data science.
As an undergraduate, she served as an officer for organizations such as the Society of Women Engineers and Association of Computing Machinery -Women. She was a peer mentor and an ambassador for the Pigman College of Engineering.
She enjoys meeting new people and loves helping new students get comfortable with college.
