Student wins Emerging Talent of the Year award

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Jen Lamere, a first-year software engineering student, won the 2014 Net Award in the category of Emerging Talent of the Year.

Jen Lamere, a first-year software engineering student at Rochester Institute of Technology, has added another prestigious award to her résumé.

She has been named the Emerging Talent of the Year by the 2014 Net Awards, an event hosted by net magazine to celebrate the best in Web design and development.

Lamere, the only woman nominated in the 10-person category and the only nominee from the U.S., received the trophy at the finals ceremony May 9 in London. Last winter, she garnered enough online votes to rank among the top five nominees and receive an invitation to the finals ceremony.

“I'm very honored to have received this award and am thankful of the support I had received from my friends, family and RIT,” said Lamere, who is originally from Nashua, N.H.

Lamere traveled to London with Lana Verschage, the director of Women in Computing at RIT. After winning the award, Lamere was surprised by Andrew Sears, dean of RIT’s B. Thomas Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences, who had traveled to London to be part of the celebration.

“We couldn’t be more proud of Jen and everything she has accomplished,” said Sears. “She has had an amazing freshman year and she is already having an impact on the college through her involvement in our Women in Computing program. We cannot wait to see what she does next.”

Lamere will take a break from programming to spend May 10—which is also her birthday—sightseeing around London.

The Emerging Talent of the Year award recognizes up-and-coming developers and designers under age 20 who have really started to make their mark this year. Also nominated on the shortlist for the Emerging Talent of the Year category were two young men from the U.K. and two from Germany.

“Jen really struck a chord with our judges because of how much she has achieved in the last year,” said Oliver Lindberg, editor of net magazine. “Her Twivo app is very impressive, especially when you consider she only started coding a year ago.”

Lamere won the grand prize at Boston’s TVNext Hack for inventing Twivo, an app that allows Twitter users to block television spoilers from their Twitter feed. To download Twivo, go to the Chrome Web Store.

The summer before coming to RIT, Lemere became Twitter’s youngest intern ever, working on the Crashlytics team for about 10 weeks. It was there that she discovered her love for client-side programming. In the future, she plans to focus on human computer interaction as an application domain and will return to Twitter this summer for a second internship. At RIT, she enjoys working on projects with the Society of Software Engineers and is a sister in Alpha Xi Delta.