Jennifer John, a rising sophomore at Stanford University studying computer science and biology, is a Coding it Forward Civic Digital Fellow at NIH this year. Jennifer is teleworking this summer from the Bay Area in California and working with Eric Sid, M.D., in the Office of Rare Diseases Research at the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) on the Genetic and Rare Diseases Information Center (GARD).
GARD is designed to provide comprehensive information about rare and genetic diseases to patients, their families, health care providers, researchers and the public.
“My job is to automate the process through which information comes to the website,” John explained. “I’m using natural language processing tools to identify key words and patterns that refer to epidemiology, which is especially important for rare disease research.”
The goal is to develop an automated process that will identify the appropriate data and then extract the information to add to the database.
For John the project is the perfect merger for her interests in computer science, medicine, and advocacy.
“I’m interested in women’s health and am hoping to go to medical school and become an OB-GYN,” John said. “Beyond practicing medicine, I want to make sure that I can leverage my experience and knowledge in a way that's scalable. It’s been eye-opening to see how the medically trained team members at NCATS have made organizational impact.”
Another motivation for John is the opportunity to be involved in advocacy. “Patient advocacy plays a big role in rare disease research,” she said. “That’s been exciting to learn about as someone interested in physician advocacy – becoming a voice for patients through organizational and policy change – especially coming from a tech background.
“But I'm still exploring and hoping to use this summer as an opportunity to better understand the wide range of career paths that involve medicine.”
As she takes what she learns about technology applications to medicine to explore her career options, John has also been pleasantly surprised by her (virtual) government agency experience. The Coding it Forward fellowship presents tech-savvy students with an opportunity to bring innovative ideas to the federal government, which is viewed by some as stagnant when it comes to technological innovation.
“It’s been great to see how welcoming they are toward not only us contributing our own ideas that might be different than what has been done previously, but also within the agency there seems to be a spirit of innovation that underlies every project,” John shared.
The Office of Data Science Strategy at NIH works with institutes and centers like NCATS and with Coding it Forward to bring fresh perspectives to tackle computational challenges facing the biomedical research workforce each summer. ODSS will feature fellows and mentors from the 2020 cohort throughout the summer. Meet Jennifer's mentor, Dr. Eric Sid.
