HiDAV boot camp

Kashley Rishforth, a recent graduate of Johnson C. Smith University, and Paris Parsons, an undergraduate at N.C. A&T, discuss their findings on the negative effects of opioid usage.

“You had to work fast and be creative, and learn to work collaboratively with people you’d never met before.”

-N.C. A&T Student Dara Bradley

HiDAV boot camp enables undergrads from HBCUs to explore career options and the growing impact of health informatics

The spread of influenza, adverse effects of opioid use for pain management, and the risk of opportunistic infections for HIV-positive patients – three issues that have significant implications for health care in North Carolina and beyond. Three issues that students participating in Carolina’s inaugural Health Informatics Data Analytics and Visualization (HiDAV) boot camp chose to tackle using data and information they extracted from research publications, census data, electronic health records, and other resources.

“Honestly, every day I learned something new,” said Joseph Fonseca, a biology pre-med major from Morehouse College. “I was expecting to come in and do traditional research similar to what I had done previously, but this isn’t the wet lab that I’m used to. This is a whole host of information on data mining, text mining, visualization, and medical imaging that was completely new to me.”

The HiDAV boot camp is part of Project ENABLE, an initiative launched by the Carolina Health Informatics Program (CHIP) to encourage students and professionals from populations that are traditionally underrepresented in science and technology fields to explore careers in biomedical and health informatics. ENABLE invited undergraduate students attending Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) to apply to the summer program, and the seven students selected for the 2018 cohort came from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, Johnson C. Smith University, Bennett College, and Morehouse College. Students spent seven weeks from late May to early July living and learning on UNC-Chapel Hill’s campus.

Classes and lectures focused on subjects including data visualization, classification algorithms, and programming languages. Students also visited RTI, SAS, Optum, and UNC’s Lineberger Cancer Center to see how the concepts they were studying are currently shaping research and medicine.

“We did a lot in seven weeks,” said Dara Bradley, a senior from N.C. A&T. “It really required some good time management to attend the lectures, do the homework, work on your project, and go to meetings. You had to work fast and be creative, and learn to work collaboratively with people you’d never met before.”

The boot camp culminated with three teams of students presenting the results of their self-directed research projects. Each team discussed the methods they had used to collect and analyze their data, the challenges they had encountered, their findings, and the ways they or other researchers could proceed in the future.

“Thanks to the dedication and hard work by ENABLE instructors and staff, the boot camp students were able to successfully demonstrate that they can select a problem, and utilizing appropriate methods, analyze diverse data sets to address critical scientific questions,” said Javed Mostafa, director of CHIP and a professor at the UNC School of Information and Library Science and UNC School of Medicine. “The boot camp students’ enthusiasm and deep interest in health data analytics has further motivated us. They have made a lasting impact on ENABLE and CHIP.”

From left: ENABLE Project Coordinator Shikha Yadav, HiDAV Instructor and SILS PhD Candidate Heejun Kim, boot camp participants Paris Parsons, La’Presha Whitfield, Kashley Rishforth, Joseph Fonseca, Dara Bradley, Kerani Davidson, and Miguel Anderson, and HiDAV Instructor and CHIP PhD Student Malvika Pillai.