Emerson Foundation - Data Science Fund

          This summer I had the opportunity to work independently on a project within the Katharine Walter lab uncovering the genomic nature of Coccidioides, a fungal pathogen that causes Valley fever upon inhaling its spores. Residing in dry arid soils within southwestern America and part of Africa, the endemic region of the fungus is expected to expand with climate change, and effect greater populations of the immunocompromised and manual labor force.

Over the summer, I was lucky enough to work with Professor Lisa Torrey building a machine learning model to identify growth of invasive water chestnut around St. Lawrence county using drone imagery. We worked alongside biology Professor Brad Baldwin, leader of the ongoing Water Chestnut Project (https://sites.stlawu.edu/brad-baldwin/water-chestnut-project/), which aims to study and fight the growth of this invasive species in the rivers and lakes surrounding SLU.

I assisted in an international research project on gender in educational institutions in Morocco, funded by the French Agency of Research (AUF) and commissioned by Mohammed V University in Rabat. I was responsible for conducting a literature review on gender and education in Morocco and examining available national data on gender and education for a cartographic analysis, working with my advisor, Prof. Rachid Touhtou. 

During my internship at Elaniin Tech Company, I collaborated with the data analysis team on Mercandu, the largest e-commerce platform in Central America. My primary responsibility was to leverage PowerBI for developing advanced visualizations and interactive dashboards, which involved handling large datasets and performing rigorous data cleaning to ensure data accuracy and reliability.

Over the summer, I worked with the Dextego CTO and Co-Founder Sean Vazquez and my fellow intern Daniel Chen on building the next version of the Dextego platform.

Dextego is an AI soft skills coaching platform that helps its users get better at pitching, presenting, making connections, etc. In short, Dextego helps businesses train its employees and beyond the skills learned, it helps the employees gain confidence.

This past summer I had the opportunity to work within a tight-knit team researching the impact of exercise prescriptions on inactive breast cancer patients. Our project is a component of a larger multipart study with the overarching goal of designing an effective exercise prescription program for individuals that have finished breast cancer treatment and need help beginning exercise post treatment.

This summer, I had the privilege to be part of the Data Science Internship Program at the World Bank. This opportunity would not have been possible without the help and economic support from Career Services at SLU and the Emerson Foundation - Data Science internship fellowship award that I was awarded. While at the World Bank, I expanded my Data Science and Economics knowledge. I was paired with a group of excellent and ambitious data scientists in the Poverty Department of Sub-Saharan Africa.

This past summer I had the honor to join the Sub-Saharan Africa Data Team at the World Bank through the Data Science Internship Program. This invaluable experience would not have been possible without the help of Career Services throughout the whole application process, as well as the financial help through the Emerson Foundation - Data Science internship fellowship award. 

In February of 2022, the ALFALFA research group began observing galaxies hosting supernovae with the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia. The resulting and incoming data requires reduction to extract important information, such as velocity, velocity width, and flux. In this project, we worked on implementing quality-of-life changes to an existing Python package to improve the experience of the researchers that will be using it.

Bulukutu tea is an aromatic and perennial plant from the savannah bush found in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The tea, made from the Bulukutu leaves, is pungent, yet soft in taste.  It has a peppery, lemony, and eucalyptus-like aroma. Many useful indigenous plants are unique to small parts of Africa, and have been used by local people for generations. Bulukutu has been the subject of study for many years because of its high antioxidant content and healing properties. In the DRC, it is brewed to treat pain, reduce inflammation and help treat a variety of common ailments.

• Created data visualization templates in Excel and Tableau that were used to support the Business Analytics team’s interactions with buy-side and sell-side clients.
• Designed a presentation repository with keyword filtering functionality that allows the Business Development team to more easily access slides and presentations used with previous clients. Over 35 PowerPoint decks have since been added to this repository.