Somendra Singh Named 2025 David Belanger Fellowship Award Winner
First-year Business Intelligence & Analytics grad student honored for performance and potential
Members of the Stevens business analytics and artificial intelligence community, including faculty, alumni and advisory board members gathered in the Babbio Center to present the 2025 David Belanger Fellowship Award to Somendra Singh.
This award is given annually to a first-year BA&AI graduate student, who is selected by a committee of faculty and the program's Industry Advisory Board members as the most likely to have a successful career in Big Data/AI.
“Thanks to the the generosity of so many donors, including family, faculty and especially alumni, we have a really solid foundation for this award, and we will continue this endeavor,” said Edward Stohr, professor of information systems and the academic coordinator for the Master of Science in Business and Intelligence and Analytics and the Master of Science in Information Systems programs. “I think this is something that David Belanger would value very much.”
Somendra earned his Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Science from RV College of Engineering, India. He worked for three years as a data analyst at Merkle, where he collaborated with major retail companies in the United States and Australia. This experience sparked his deep interest in data science and artificial intelligence. In Fall 2024, he began work on his master’s degree with a concentration in Data Science/AI. Somendra is currently gaining hands-on industry experience as a data management and reporting intern at Newark Airport’s Terminal A, with Munich Airport NJ LLC.
“I am very grateful for this award,” he said. “I'm thankful for the great mentors I’ve had here that helped me during my first year. I wish I knew Professor Belanger personally. Having heard all the good things about him, I'm sure he was a really great person, and I hope I'm able to take his legacy forward and do something good with it.”
The award was presented at a luncheon by David Belanger’s daughter, Erin Blackwell, his sister, Nora Belanger, and the inaugural winner, Abishek Panchal, who is now a business intelligence analyst at eClinicalWorks.
David G. Belanger was a beloved and respected Stevens School of Business faculty member who passed away in 2022. Internationally known as a pioneering authority on Big Data and data governance, David joined Stevens in 2012 as a senior research fellow. He taught courses in the BI&A graduate program and led major research efforts. During his 30 years at AT&T Bell Labs, David contributed to advances that made the world of computing and Big Data that we know today possible.
