Yordanos Ayelework is a senior computer science major who made her way to McMurry as an international student from her home country of Ethiopia. For the past year, Yordanos worked closely with Computer Science Professor Dr. Aravind Mohan to research “Interfaith Informatics”, a web-based comparison tool that utilizes language learning models to educate users about a particular religion’s position on moral, social, or cultural issues. Her research work was recognized with a first-place award in Math and Computer Science at the Texas Academy of Science 2025 meeting in March.
“Interfaith Informatics has three features – information, sentiment, and comparison,” Yordanos said. “Information gives you a list of all the sacred texts in a religion. Sentiment lets you check the general sentiment of a religion on a specific topic. Comparison lets you compare two different religions on one topic. At this project stage, we’ve used generative AI – large language models like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Cloud to help us analyze the data.”
For Yordanos, who grew up in the bustling Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa before moving to the States, the project helped her improve her communication skills as both a STEM major and in her day-to-day life, immersed in U.S. culture.
“Communication is essential to me. And I think it’s been more important since I moved here. Moving from one culture to another, communication is different. So things that are never misunderstood back home would be misunderstood here. I had to learn to word my thoughts so that people here would understand how I mean it.”
Yordanos’s hard work to become part of McMurry’s campus community has paid off for her in many ways. She credits her close relationship with Dr. Mohan (“Dr. Mo” as she calls him) with helping her navigate the initial unsteadiness she experienced when work began on Interfaith Informatics. Now that she’s presented her model at several student research conferences, she can think more broadly about what McMurry University means to her.
“My favorite thing about McMurry is the community that I have been able to form here. Whether in the academic setting with my professors or peers, or where I work, which is the S3C in the library. My co-workers are great people. And also my friends I’ve met just by being here at McMurry.”
Watch the video below to hear more about Yordanos’s journey as an international student working in student research.