Since 1995, Judy Riggie has been the director of the Division of Scientific Categorization and Analysis (DSCA) within the Office of Extramural Research (OER). This summer, she and her team mentored two Coding it Forward Civic Digital fellows, Marissa Joy and Rohan Narain.
Riggie has been with her office for many years, and she has experience in hand coding grants.
“John Prue and I have a competition about how long we’ve been around,” Riggie joked.
She’s stayed in the job for so long because she likes the work and really likes the people. Her office, she said, “informs the public about what NIH is doing in a meaningful way.”
This summer, Riggie and her team brought on fellows to help DSCA build a web app, which will use natural language processing to help sort grant information for internal NIH staff.
“You can insert an abstract or question and the app will show you related grant summaries,” said Narain.
“Rohan is focusing more on the text summarization and I’m working on the QA side,” Joy added. “We’re starting to put them together to deploy the app.”
Initially, Riggie had planned on having only Narain with her office for the summer. With the rapid switch to telework, “Marissa was unable to do her original program due to the circumstances,” Riggie said. “We knew we could use two fellows, so we chatted with Marissa and she was interested in what we had to offer.
“What’s unique about the relationship with Marissa and Rohan is they’re the experts in data science and I know the data from a science perspective.”
Riggie focused on using her fellows’ time to help her team look at old data in a different way, such as adding this new app to the existing automated grant information.
When asked why she decided to mentor two fellows, especially given Joy’s last-minute addition, she shared, “It is a very rewarding relationship helping people get to where they want to be.”
She’s hopeful that she can be a small part of Narain’s and Joy’s journeys into their science careers.
“I think this has been a really trying time for everyone,” Riggie said, “but people are still being really phenomenal about getting the work done and being able to work together.”
The Office of Data Science Strategy at NIH works with institutes and centers 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 Judy's fellows, Marissa and Rohan.
