Wednesday, October 3, 2018

OSCAR Student Anushka Prativadhi Works on an Intersection between Biology, Data Science, and Computer Science

The research project that my peers and I are working on is an interesting intersection between Biology, Data Science, and Computer Science. We hoped to accomplish three tasks over the course of 10 weeks. The first task was to build a Transcription Factor tool which would compute the Association between a Gene and its Transcription Factor as well as measure the significance of their relationship. The second task includes analyzing the patient data through RNA seq analysis, and the third task involves creating a course that teaches RNA Seq analysis to undergraduate students.

The primary responsibility of the development team was to work on the web tool. Over the past weeks, we have been working on developing the Transcription Factor tool. We worked on building a database of Associations, writing a computational code in Python that would calculate the significance of the relationship between the Gene and its Transcription Factor, and finally we are working on developing a website where everyone is able to input a given set of gene IDs and find out the associations between those genes.

I was interested in taking up this project because I wanted to determine if I am able to consider a future in the Healthcare field as a data scientist. I also wanted to determine if being a researcher was something I should consider in the future. Working on this project has been a great experience for me; I gained a lot of knowledge from my mentor and my peers about.

I was introduced to the vast world of web development and I look forward to building upon it in the future.