We’re continuing to feature our 1st year doctoral students! We hope everyone is able to get to know this talented and diverse new group of students.
Hi! My name is Maya Ramchandran and I grew up in Berkeley, California. I completed my undergraduate degree at Brown in Applied Math and Biology in 2015, and have spent the last couple years in Boston pursuing a Master of Music degree in violin performance at the New England Conservatory. I became interested in biostatistics early in college, when I started working in computational population genetics research. My thesis project was to construct a Naïve Bayes classifier that could distinguish between different population history scenarios. I am excited to join the biostatistics department here as a member of the cancer training grant.
Outside of school, music is still a very big part of my life, and I am continuing to play and perform in Boston and New York. I also love to run, travel, and read.
I’m Harrison Reeder, and I grew up in a suburb of Chicago, IL. I graduated two years ago from Carleton College with a B.A. in Math/Statistics, and have since worked doing healthcare and economic research at a Boston based consulting firm called Analysis Group.
My interest in biostatistics springs from a love of telling impactful stories with numbers, and using statistical reasoning to improve social and health policies. This interest has led me to research experiences in social media analysis, causal inference, and global health. In college I spent a summer at the University of Washington using text modeling to better understand the ways emergency response agencies coordinate messaging on Twitter. My senior thesis focused on developing causal inference methods for case referent studies, with applications in public policy and health studies. My more recent collaborative work includes evaluation of a tuberculosis screening program in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, with the goal of influencing Haitian national screening guidelines.
As an incoming student under the Big Data grant, I am particularly eager to explore methods for using observational databases and other Big Data sources like social media to better understand social and health outcomes.
Outside of statistics and public health, I enjoy playing Ultimate Frisbee, grilling, and endlessly snooping around in bookstores and libraries. I love music whether hip-hop or bluegrass, and I’ve never met a pun I didn’t like.
