How/Why Research? Coming into Carolina, there were many things I wasn’t sure about, but having been exposed to research in high school, I knew that I wanted to pursue research in a field I was deeply passionate about. While finding opportunities amid COVID-19 and virtual classes was hard, booking 1:1’s with OUR and following their resources on cold emailing really helped me land a research opportunity right in my field of interest.
Research Experience: Currently, I work at the CompCy Lab, where I’m able to combine my personal interests with existing technical knowledge while constantly learning more about machine learning techniques in the field of computational medicine. At my lab, I’ve worked with identifying patterns in single cell cancer datasets through various machine learning and clustering techniques. Ultimately, this research can be used to create a diagnostic test for how the immune system is impacted when someone has cancer. This information could even be used to make the immune system more resistant to disease down the line. During my time at the CompCy Lab, I’ve also performed similar machine learning techniques on single-cell data from pregnancy datasets, which can be used to predict when a woman might go into labor by identifying predictive biomarkers.
Student Organizations/Clubs: CADS (Carolina Analytics and Data Science), AI @ UNC
Also Happy to Chat about: Obtaining Opportunities as an International Student, Navigating Unpaid vs Paid Opportunities
Random Fun Fact: I spent Spring 2023 studying abroad in Singapore and did research there too!