Ananya Yammanuru is the recipient of the Graduate or Professional Student Award for Excellence in Public Engagement. Yammanuru is pursuing her Ph.D. in computer science and holds bachelor’s degrees from Illinois in computer science and brain and cognitive science. She leads the computer science department’s Girls Who Code and Sunday Coding Studio outreach programs, enabling access to computer science to K-12 students in the Champaign County area.
Written by Thomas Bruch
Ananya Yammanuru
Individuals and teams from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who have made a visible impact on society were recently recognized with the 2025 Campus Awards for Excellence in Public Engagement. Faculty, staff members, students and community members who engage the public to address critical civic and community issues at the local, state, national and global levels were honored at an awards ceremony last month.
The recipients this year include faculty and staff members Antoinette Burton and Lee Ragsdale; graduate student Ananya Yammanuru; undergraduate student Ariana Mizan; the Entomology Graduate Student Association team; and the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology Communications and Outreach team.
Ananya Yammanuru is the recipient of the Graduate or Professional Student Award for Excellence in Public Engagement.
Yammanuru is pursuing her Ph.D. in computer science at the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science and holds bachelor’s degrees from Illinois in computer science from The Grainger College of Engineering and brain and cognitive science from the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences. She leads the computer science department’s Girls Who Code and Sunday Coding Studio outreach programs, enabling access to computer science to K-12 students in the Champaign County area.
Since her first year on campus in 2018, Yammanuru has been involved with Girls Who Code, rising from a facilitator up through the leadership ranks. She displayed creativity and perseverance in addressing logistical challenges during her tenure, from researching different coding platforms to overcoming diminished resources when the program resumed operations following the COVID-19 pandemic. Yammanuru also founded the Sunday Coding Studio after she discovered nothing existed locally that offered programming like Girls Who Code — free and easily accessible — that was open to all students. The studio was piloted in spring 2024 and became a full-fledged program last fall, providing coding activities beyond foundational principles to students of all genders.