Concentrator Mridula (Mally) Shan received First Place Prize (specifically, she won the Ruth and Silen M.D. Award for Public Health, Epidemiology, or Biostatistics, Bioinformatics, Physics, Chemistry, or Engineering, and Clinical or Social Science) in poster presentations for this year’s New England Science Symposium. The poster presented Mally's work on a health security dashboard that she originally created in Stat 108 Introduction to Statistical Computing with R, taught by Senior Lecturer Kelly McConville (the dashboard is available here: https://mal-shan.shinyapps.io/healthsecurity/).
Mally presented her poster at the 23rd annual New England Science Symposium (NESS) on March 23, 2024, at the Harvard Medical School. This conference was established in 2002 in order for students and postdoctoral fellows, particularly individuals from underrepresented minority groups, to share their health-related research and ideas and to build their professional network.
In addition, Mally submitted her health security dashboard to The National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) Aspirations in Computing Program (AiC), becoming a finalist for the 2024 AiC Collegiate Award. According to the NCWIT website, 55 undergraduate and graduate women, genderqueer, and non-binary award finalists were selected from 41 academic institutions nationwide based on the creativity and potential impact of their technical projects.
Reflecting on receiving these awards, Mally said, "It was so exciting to see how many biomedical professionals were interested in the project, with the judges even telling me that their medical institutions had been victims to cyberattacks and that they wanted to use these tools to further understand these trends in health breaches." Mally also shared with us that Dr. McConville's teaching of R during Stat 108 helped her to imagine this project and to "create such interactive, impactful, and engaging platforms." Congratulations to Mally!