Team Information

Location: Albuquerque, NM

Established: 1889

Enrollment: 25,400

Mascots: Lobo

The University of New Mexico is fielding two teams in the 2025 Winter Classic, Team Lobos and Team Roadrunner. This is the second appearance for the Roadrunners and while they finished sixth over all, they had a mid-competition surge that saw them top the field on two modules in a row. With better opening and closing scores, they could have finished in the top echelon. Team Roadrunner has a full slate of six undergraduate students, including one that was on the team last year, so they could move up the ranks this year.

This is the second year that the Lobos are pitted against the Roadrunners, the Lobos took round one, let’s see what happens in round two.

Roadrunner team picture x650

2025 Team Roadrunner Roster

 

 

 

Xavier Barr:  "My name is Xavier Barr, a student studying Computer Science and working as a robotics research faculty assistant at the University of New Mexico. I have experience in full stack web development, but now I have a passion for working on robots and machine learning applications."

 

 

 

 

 

Anuj Bhattarai:  "My name is Anuj Bhattarai. I am a freshman at the University of New Mexico, majoring in Computer Science. Originally from Nepal, I am an international student with a passion for problem-solving and graphic design. I enjoy combining creativity with technology to tackle challenges and create innovative solutions.

I am particularly excited to learn more about high-performance computing (HPC) and supercomputing, as I believe they hold great potential for addressing real-world problems. With my curiosity and drive, I look forward to growing my skills and contributing meaningfully to this field. I love playing guitar and traveling."

 

 

 

 

 

Abdullah Ismail:  "Hello! My name is Abdullah Ismail. I’m a sophomore at the University of New Mexico, majoring in Computer Science with a minor in Business. My passion for computers and understanding how they work sparked my interest in HPC. Currently, I’m an Intern at Intel. I work in their data center in Rio Rancho, New Mexico supporting their HPC cluster. Outside of school and work I play soccer, watch movies, and play video games."

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jawid Mohammed:  "My name is Jawid Mohammadi, and I’m a senior majoring in Computer Science with a minor in Mathematics. I have gained hands-on experience through internships, where I’ve maintained/developed server-based web applications and Android applications using Java and its associated frameworks."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Molly Palko:  "I am Molly Palko, a junior in Computer Science, minoring in Mathematics. I competed in the student cluster competition in SC24, and I look forward to gaining more HPC experience in the upcoming competition. I have an interest in natural language processing, computational linguistics, and AI."

 

 

 

 

 

Leo Wang:  "Hello, I am Leo Wang, a fourth-year Computer Science student with a minor in Mathematics. I enjoy diving into different projects and challenging myself to learn new things. Right now, I’m working on building a pipeline for an automated trading bot that can handle live market information, which has been a great way to explore real-time data processing and analysis. Through some of these projects and a course on HPC, I’ve developed a strong interest in the field, and I’m looking forward to deepen my understanding in HPC through this opportunity. For fun, I love playing the alto saxophone and pickleball, and lately, I’ve started picking up the trumpet and Korean."

 

 

 

Faculty Advisor/Coach:  Dr. Matthew Fricke

2024 Team Roadrunner

 

 

 

"My name is Xavier Barr, I'm a junior at the University of New Mexico and my major is Computer Science. I have experience building full-stack web applications from a previous internship. Right now, I'm interested in exploring new avenues and narrowing down what I want to do for the future."

 

 

 

 

 

 

"My name is Kritim Bastola. I am a Cs major at University of New Mexico. I am an international student here and I am from Nepal.

I love solving problems that is the main reason why I choose Computer Science. I am currently doing Software Development and building up apps, but in the near future I would like to hop into AI or Block-Chain related things. The current programming language that I use the most is Java.

Besides that I love watching anime, discovering new music and playing soccer."

 

 

 

 

 

"My name is Maisy Dunlavy and I am attending the University of New Mexico for a degree in Computer Science and Linguistics. Because of the dual major my academic level is a bit weird, but I am at the junior level in my computer science coursework. I'll be graduating in May of 2025 and will be looking to attend a graduate school to get my Masters and potentially my PhD. I'm interested in eventually working in natural language processing, but also have a strong interest in performance engineering focused on scientific applications."

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Greetings all, my name is Carter Frost, I'm a transfer student from Santa Cruz California and am a senior at The University of New Mexico. I originally worked in cybersecurity in PKI(systems that establish & maintain trust), I taught at the highschool and college level for a few years and got into robots as a hobby and am now pursuing that as a career. I am now working for UNM's Moses Biological Computation Lab on various projects like with NASA's Houston space center on a new class of rovers for the Moon & Project Chili House(Robots growing food in space) & VolCAN(flying drones into volcanoes to map CO2 plumes), and Swarmathon TNG(Teaching robots to recognise objects they can interact with). I also work for Sandia National Labs in robot autonomy."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Maurice (Reece) Ransby:  "I'm a CS student here at UNM, and I plan on going all the way to Ph.D. after undergrad. I am also a research student under faculty for Bioinformatics and that's something I've been taking a huge interest in. I would like to eventually help aid in the cure of cancer and other diseases with use of my programming skills in the Machine Language/Deep Learning area. I love learning new things about technology and wish to utilize them for the greater good."

 

 

 

 

Faculty Advisor/Coach:

  • Dr. Matthew Fricke

2023 Winter Classic

 

 

"Sachi Barnaby is a sophomore majoring in computer science. She is currently researching robotic cooperative transport inspired by ants, and she is interested in interdisciplinary work related to robotics and complex systems. Outside of the classroom, she plays the oboe in the Symphony Orchestra."

"Carter Frost is a transfer student from Santa Cruz, California he is just starting his third semester here at UNM. For over 10 years he worked in cybersecurity working on private key infrastructure like national ID systems, Certificate management and private key storage systems called HSMs(systems that establish and maintain trust). He has been taught at Cabrillo College/PVUSD engineering camps well over the 7 years, as well as being a supplemental instructor at Cabrillo College. Carter got into robotics ~5 years ago initially through his local community college in California (Cabrillo College's) Robotics club, He worked remotely with UNM's Moses Biological Computation Lab on various projects like with NASA's Houston space center on a new class of rovers for the Moon & Project ChiliHouse but he has made the move out to Albuquerque and is now working on UNM's VolCAN team."

 

 

"Alex Knigge is a first-year Computer Science student at the University of New Mexico. She is a former intern at the Center for High Technology Materials doing research on waveguides for optical lasers while her current research interests at Sandia National Laboratories involve environmental modeling and simulations. She also plays trombone for UNM’s Soundpack Band and is involved with the UNM Esports team."

 

 

"Ellie Larence is a junior studying computer science. Her current work focuses on encoding immunological signals to enhance SIMCoV, an agent-based model of SARS-CoV-2 infection, and is particularly interested in computational solutions to biological problems. She enjoys eating and making elaborate baked goods."

 

 

"Abigail Pribisova is a senior studying computer science at the University of New Mexico. Throughout her undergraduate degree, she has conducted research on mathematical and computational models of viral spread, satisfiability and interpolation algorithms, discrete event simulations, network theory, and applied machine intelligence. She also plays five instruments."

 

 

"Ryan Scherbarth is a sophomore Computer Science student at the University of New Mexico. Interested in the Cyber Security space, he previously worked as a software resiliency engineer within the space vehicles directorate of the Air Force Research Laboratory, and is currently working as a solutions architect intern in the Cyber Security & Mission Computing Center at Sandia National Laboratories."

Bacon Fricke edited