#  Statistics Students Receive Banga Social Innovation Thesis Award 

 





May 05, 2026

 

 

Congratulations to Amy Dong, Saman de Silva, and Leo Vanciu on receiving this year’s [Banga Social Innovation Thesis Award](https://publicservice.fas.harvard.edu/bangasocialinnovationthesisawards)!

Now in its second year, this Award recognizes Harvard College seniors whose outstanding theses or capstone projects demonstrate the potential to develop innovative solutions to pressing challenges facing people, communities, the environment, and our collective future.

We reached out to Amy, Saman, and Leo to hear more about the motivation behind their projects:

**Amy Dong on her thesis “AI-Driven Protein Representation for Neurodegenerative Therapeutic Discovery”:** A protein's function depends not just on its protein sequence but also on the cellular context it inhabits, yet most foundation models collapse protein representations into a single, cell-agnostic embedding. My project creates SEMPER: a multimodal model that uses contrastive alignment between sequence and cell type-specific protein interaction networks to learn embeddings whose geometry reflects context-dependent function, enabling us to recover candidate therapeutic targets for neurodegenerative diseases and pinpoint the specific cellular contexts where those targets may be most relevant.

**Saman de Silva on his thesis “Quantifying the Operational PM2.5 Burden of Hyperscale Datacenters”:** Since high school, my main motivations have been questions of environmental justice: why are certain communities forced to bear disproportionate environmental burdens? With my thesis, I wanted to tackle a project that would generate novel tools by which impacted communities can be better informed advocates for their environmental health.

**Leo Vanciu on his thesis “When Cities Heat Up: Extreme Heat and Firearm Violence in Urban America”:** My project was motivated by the growing urgency of two public health challenges: firearm violence and extreme heat. I examined whether acute heat exposure increases short-term firearm violence risk, while also studying the causal assumptions behind binary and continuous exposure designs and the statistical tradeoffs of dichotomizing a continuous exposure like heat.



 

 

 

    ![Saman de Silva](/sites/g/files/omnuum10116/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2026-05/saman%20de%20silva.png?itok=ZPUIzW0Q) 

 



 

  

 

    ![Leo Vanciu](/sites/g/files/omnuum10116/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2026-05/leo.png?itok=vKHR5MxT) 

 



 

  

 

    ![Amy Dong](/sites/g/files/omnuum10116/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2026-05/AmyDong_Headshot.jpeg?itok=UFmwoWBv) 

 



 

  

 

 

 

 

 



 

 See also:- [ Featured Awards ](/news-type/featured-awards)
- [ Undergraduate News ](/news-type/undergraduate-news)