We are thrilled to announce that PhD student Siyuan Ma and Postdoc Boyu Ren were part of the winning team at the Boston Datathon! Along with Harvard Statistics PhD student Ryan Lee, and Eric Alt, a PhD student from MIT, the team took home the first-place prize of $20,000.
The Datathon was held at the Knafel Center at Radcliffe on September 23, and was sponsored by Citadel & Citadel Securities in partnership with Correlation One, the Harvard Data Science Initiative, and Harvard Data Ventures. Biostatistics Professors Rafael Irizarry and Xihong Lin also contributed their expertise to the event, working with Citadel and Correlation One to screen and prepare the dataset and serving as a judge for the competition, respectively.
Siyuan, Boyu, Ryan, and Eric spent seven hours wrangling with and analyzing numerous genomics datasets. They had to produce a technical report that not only detailed their technical approach to the problem, but also explained why their conclusions were relevant to the public at large.
The four PhD students came out on top of a pool of over 600 people who originally applied to participate in the event. They will now go on to compete at the global competition on November 27th in New York City for a chance to win $100,000. Congratulations to this impressive team and best of luck in the final competition.
