by KARA SCHWEISS
Vidya Bommanapally, who earned her master’s degree from UNO, is completing her Ph.D. in computing and information science this summer and has already established herself as a visionary. In March, she was named Nebraska Tech Innovator of the Year at the 2026 Women in Tech Annual Summit organized by the Aksarben Foundation’s Nebraska Tech Collaborative.
The award — described by Women in Tech as honoring creativity and ingenuity leading to groundbreaking technologies that solve complex problems and drive meaningful progress in the honoree’s field — recognized Bommanapally’s research spanning health AI, education and materials science and validated the extraordinary promise she has demonstrated early in her career.
For Bommanapally, imagination is not limited to artistic endeavors. It serves as a driving force behind scientific discovery, enabling researchers to explore new ideas, challenge existing assumptions and create novel solutions.
“Imagination is like a bridge from what you know to what you create,” she said.
“‘Imagination is more important than knowledge,’ because it takes you beyond what already exists,” she said, referencing a favorite quote from Albert Einstein.
That mindset has guided Bommanapally’s interdisciplinary work in artificial intelligence. Her research applies AI across a diverse range of fields, from medical imaging to biomaterials to education — each requiring new ways of thinking and connecting ideas across disciplines.
“We have to look at the problem from different perspectives, and we have to get inspiration from different fields and connect the ideas and the knowledge we have from across the fields,” she said. “My imagination, I think, starts with the question, ‘What if?’ ‘What if I do this?’ ‘What if I apply this algorithm to my data set?’ ‘How does it work/how would it work?’” she said, adding that the answers to those questions also “take inspiration from the actual biology of human brain.”
Bommanapally also helped develop a game called Quantum to teach students complex concepts in quantum computing while making the subject engaging and understandable — an example of imagination translating abstract theory into accessible learning. The challenge was finding a way to make a highly abstract subject both engaging and comprehensible.
“We needed some kind of imagination to convert the concept so that it can be available in the game, and the students will be able to play it,” she said. The award-winning project later incorporated AI to adapt to individual learners.
Her UNO experience has been key to her success, said Bommanapally, a native of India.
“I’m very grateful to that I came here, and for all the opportunities that I got,” she said. “I have all these collaborations with different universities that I can work on (with) different problems, and I think UNO itself is also supportive with things like travel funds or research-related support, where I could go around and present my work in different conferences.”
Bommanapally said she plans to continue advancing AI research while staying open to new possibilities.
“I’m pretty much open to new directions or new challenges, whatever comes my way,” she said. “Most of the work that I’m doing has been because I’ve been open to work on different things, so I’m excited to see where it goes and what I’ll be working on next.”
