Future Leaders

The computer science major was selected to be part of Penn State’s Millennium Scholars Program, which assists high-achieving students as they prepare for STEM-related careers. “The program cultivates a community of scholars to solve global problems,” says Onweller. Earning the scholarship was a goal of Onweller’s while she was in high school—she learned about the opportunity through her sister, Lauren Onweller ’22 Eng, who was also a Millennium Scholar.

Protecting Privacy

Onweller’s research at Columbia University in the summer of 2022 explored how to optimize differential privacy, which is a mathematical tool that shares group data patterns while protecting individual information. “Sometimes, say for medical reasons or the U.S. Census, people want to submit their data, but they don’t want it to be traced,” she explains. This work, along with related research at Penn State regarding location privacy, garnered her a nomination for the prestigious Barry Goldwater Scholarship.

Tech Ethics

“I’m interested in implementing technology in ethical and safe ways,” says Onweller, who is considering a career as a data scientist consulting in technology governance. She’s already held two internships at PricewaterhouseCoopers in that arena, getting experience within PwC’s products and technology department and, more recently, its innovation hub.

Senior Project

Her Schreyer Honors thesis entails creating visual aids to help users better understand the complicated topic of location privacy: “There are so many parameters that visualizations are bound to be more helpful.”

Strength in Numbers

Onweller is an active member of Penn State’s Association of Women in Computing, and she served as its president last year. The group collaborates with the Colleges of Engineering and IST to help retain and support women in tech. “I met with deans and felt like we, as a community, were being heard,” says Onweller, who also participates in the engineering sorority Phi Sigma Rho.