National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) Aspirations: A Journey into Computational Biology
Hi there, as you might know, I’m a 2021 and 2020 NCWIT National Honorable Mention Award and Texas Aspirations in Computing Award Winner interested in computational biology and genomics! As an Aspirations in Computing awardee for the past three years, I have been privileged to be invited to special Apple-sponsored workshops which catalyzed my interests in computational biology and bioinformatics.
In the summer of 2019, I was invited to Apple, Austin for a digital electronics and hardware workshop. At this workshop, I gained hands-on experience with Arduino, learned about logic gates, met with other NCWIT Aspiration awardees, and learned from empowering women at Apple.
Amidst COVID, in the summer of 2020, I was given a bigger opportunity to learn alongside NCWIT and Apple in a two-month-long, virtual collaborative experience with winners and Apple employees from the Bay Area and Austin. Through this experience, I engaged in Apple workshops on silicon design, code review strategies, and writing programs using GitHub. This program introduced me to some amazing and accomplished women at Apple and at NCWIT, such as Kim Vorrath, Vice President of the TDG SW Program at Apple and a Director of NCWIT. I also met Emily Pederson, Charlotte Hill, and Maddie Zug, some of the main coordinators of the program. Through conversations with Hannah Sarver, Ritika Nevatia, and Sivapriya Mohanray, I learned about their journeys from fields like chemistry, english, and finance, to programming, engineering, and to startups. I learned about the importance of thinking outside of the box and how innovation and progress come from failure.
During the workshop, I also wrote my first-ever program in Java with two other awardees!! It was a simple game of tic-tac-toe that used basic methods, switch-case statements, and boolean conditionals, but was a wonderful way to learn about the application of computer science while writing alluring lines of code.
Empowered by this experience, I started my own journey into exploring computational biology and bioinformatics. Throughout my junior year of high school and the summer afterward, I built computational models using ordinary differential equations. These models could give time-scale measurements of various genes and proteins in intracellular signaling pathways in Rheumatoid Arthritis. These models helped identify possible drug targets and diagnostic biomarkers that could alleviate or highlight the presence of joint destruction in the human body. I wrote a few papers on this experience, one of which can be found on medRxiv!
From this experience, I dabbled in researching the applications of convolutional codes of DNA codes in the growing field of biocomputation. I learned the true value of synergism at the intersection of collaboration when I worked with various global institutes to use data visualization to analyze the COVID-19 vaccination allocation pipeline and strategies in Mongolia and India. From this, I also started writing blogs on Medium regarding advances, experiences, and interests in computational biology and genomics.
In all, NCWIT has offered an exceptional Aspiration awardee community of like-minded, motivated peers reachable through Facebook, Slack, emails, and newsletters, which has motivated me to explore various different fields of computation and ultimately landing on computational biology. Moving forward, I hope to continue serving, researching, innovating, and learning at the forefront of computational biology, in conjunction with NCWIT!
