News

Bard student Elena Botts ’18 has been named the inaugural Serota fellow at the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College. The Kevin Serota Fellowship at the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College was established in June by Kendall (KC) Serota ’04 and his parents, Kim Blaine Serota and Karen Ann Serota, in tribute to KC’s brother, Kevin Daniel Serota, who died in December 2015. The Kevin Serota Fellowship at the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College honors Kevin’s passion and aptitude in the field of drone technology and creation. The fellowship is a semester-long, intensive research position awarded to a student who has demonstrated exceptional research and writing skills, as well as an academic or professional interest in unmanned systems technology and associated issues. The Serota fellow will support a variety of original research initiatives, including both short-term and long-term research assignments, and is expected to work independently under strict deadlines. In addition to assigned work, the Serota fellow will be invited to submit proposals for original research projects to be considered for publication by the Center for the Study of the Drone.
 
Kevin Daniel Serota was Lead System Engineer at Detroit Aircraft Corporation (DAC), where he engineered, created, and built drones professionally. Kevin’s interest in drones started as a hobbyist working with aerial photography, and his passion led him into his career at DAC. He became an invaluable team member and worked on projects including the creation of drones that went to Africa to aid in antipoaching efforts and a research drone that was shipped to Antarctica. Kevin was most interested in the drone’s capacity for good. Kevin’s brother, Kendall (KC) Serota ’04, has been a member of the Bard College Alumni/ae Association’s Board of Governors since 2011. He currently serves as Vice President and Cochair of the Diversity Committee. KC and his family believe that Bard’s interdisciplinary perspective on drones honors the memory of Kevin’s interests and was instrumental in their decision to create the Kevin Serota Fellowship Fund at the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College.
 
Elena Botts’18 is a Global and International Studies major with a concentration in Mind, Brain, and Behavior at Bard College. Since graduation from high school in 2014, Elena has interned and worked for local nonprofits and political campaigns, including working for local officials in the school board and state legislatures. In 2015, she interned at Lawyers for Human Rights, where she did policy research and directly assisted refugees. As a visual artist and poet, Elena explores how the psyche can influence society. Her work has been published in dozens of literary magazines and two poetry books and exhibited in local galleries.

Cyril is a Solution Architect at UiPath, the global leader in Robotic Process Automation. In their personal life, Cyril is the Alumni Chair of The LASA Foundation, and freelances as a tattoo artist. Prior to their current role, Cyril was an Instructor and Student Coordinator for All Star Code, a non-profit connecting young men of color to the tech industry. Cyril was born in Laredo, TX, raised in Austin, and currently resides in Harlem, NYC. They received their B.A. in Mathematics and Computer Science from Bard College in 2016, after completing a joint senior project in group-based cryptography.

Morgan Evans is a PhD student at the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, researching natural language processing on privacy policies. She published and presented a portion of her Senior Project, "An Evaluation of Constituency-based Hyponymy Extraction from Privacy Policies," at IEEE's 25th International Requirements Engineering Conference in Lisbon, Portugal. While a student at Bard, she was a research assistant in the Memory Dynamics Lab and a student fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities.

Brad Whitaker '18, a student in Bard's 3+2 engineering program with Dartmouth College, tells the story of coming out to the Bard Lacrosse Team.