The Helmut Veith Stipends 2026 and the VCLA awards 2025 ceremony took place on April 30 at TU Wien Informatics, bringing together students, researchers, and representatives from academia and public institutions to celebrate achievements in logic and computer science. During the event, the Helmut Veith Stipend and the VCLA International Student Awards were presented to outstanding young researchers.

Photo credit: Markus Hollo / TU Wien Informatics

The Helmut Veith Stipend program is supported by TU Wien and the Wolfgang Pauli Institute (WPI) and aims to encourage women in STEM fields and support young female researchers in computer science. During the event, WPI Director Norbert Mauser spoke about the importance of creating sustainable support structures and attractive career opportunities for women in academia.

The ceremony also welcomed representatives of the Austrian Federal Ministry for Women, Science and Research. In his address, Maximilian Richter emphasized the importance of strengthening diversity and inclusion in technology and artificial intelligence and stressed the need to create equal opportunities for women in these fields.

Photo credit: Markus Hollo / TU Wien Informatics

This year’s Helmut Veith Stipends were awarded to Ghada Ahmed and Rasmi Bhattarai, selected from a large international pool of applicants. In addition, the VCLA International Student Awards recognized excellent academic work by Wietze Koops and Hannah Louise Wilk in the areas of logic and computer science. The co-chair of the selection committee, Shqiponja Ahmetaj, presented the awards to the winners.

The event concluded with informal discussions and networking among participants, offering an opportunity for exchange between students, researchers, and institutional partners.

About the Helmut Veith Stipend holders

Ghada Ahmed comes from Egypt, where she completed a Bachelor’s degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering with a minor in Computer Science at the American University in Cairo. After spending two years working in cybersecurity, she decided to leave her job and move abroad to pursue her long-standing interest in embedded systems engineering. She is now studying Embedded Computing Systems Engineering, motivated by both academic ambition and a desire to broaden her professional and personal horizons in an international environment.

Rasmi Bhattarai earned her Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering in Nepal and has since gained experience in artificial intelligence, particularly in conversational AI, natural language processing, and computer vision. Before beginning her Master’s degree in Data Science at TU Wien, she worked as an AI Engineer on projects in areas such as banking, insurance, and healthcare. Alongside her studies, she works as a Student Assistant at the dataLab and remains actively involved in the tech community through workshops and outreach activities.

Photo credit: Markus Hollo / TU Wien Informatics

About the VCLA International Student Awardees

Wietze Koops received the Outstanding Master Thesis Award for his thesis Algorithms for Dec-POMDPs, supervised by Sebastian Junges and Nils Jansen. He is currently a PhD student at Lund University and the University of Copenhagen, where his research focuses on combinatorial optimization and formally verified solving methods.

Hannah Louise Wilk received the Outstanding Undergraduate Thesis Award for her thesis Translation-Based Theorem Proving for First-Order Modal Logic, supervised by Gerhard Lakemeyer and Shakil M. Khan. She is currently studying in the Master of Logic program at the University of Amsterdam, with interests in automated theorem proving, modal logic, and knowledge representation.

Photo credit: Markus Hollo / TU Wien Informatics