After graduating from Girls Who Code in May 2018, Sarah Brabec has been conducting research with Vy Nguyen, a Ph.D. Candidate in Bioinformatics, to evaluate the influence of chemical exposures on chronic kidney disease. For her high school senior thesis, she is working with a dataset of 82,091 participants, 121 chemicals, and 4 indicators of kidney health. Her outstanding work has gained international attention with her abstract accepted as an oral presentation at two conferences during this summer: International Society of Exposure Sciences (ISES) and International Society of Environmental Epidemiology (ISEE). On August 26th (above), Sarah presented her senior thesis project at ISEE in Utrecht, Netherlands, where the scientific community commented that “science has a very bright future.” Sarah will continue to conduct research with Vy, and her work will be published in a peer-reviewed journal.
The third annual Girls Who Code Club hosted by the student organization, Girls Who Code at University of Michigan Department of Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics (GWC at UM DCMB), kicked off on Tuesday, September 17, 2019! This year we have 16 students spanning 11 high schools and residing in Wayne, Oakland, and Washtenaw counties. We will spend 29 weeks learning Python programming and data science skills! Check out the word cloud made by our students with their initial thoughts about coding/programming.
May 1st - Alumna Reflects on Time with GWC
GWC Alumna Pooja Kannappan shares the following thoughts on her time spent as part of GWC:
I had a great experience at Girls Who Code last year. The program offered me a truly fun and exciting learning environment surrounded by amazing female mentors and like-minded peers. I thought that the curriculum was both engaging and flexible in order to challenge different levels of knowledge. Personally, the guest speakers at the meetings were extremely valuable to me and gave me a lot of insight into the variety of careers associated with data science and STEM in general. Additionally, a few sessions of Girls Who Code were centered on finding research internships, and this inspired me to connect with a few professors at U of M and eventually do a summer research internship in the bioinformatics department, where I helped perform computational gene analysis of pre-diabetes in teens, and also work with the pediatrician who compiled the data. Girls Who Code also opened many other opportunities for me to connect with inspiring women in technology. Lastly, working with my partner on our capstone project taught me a lot about solving problems spontaneously and using the resources available to me to create something new. Overall, Girls Who Code is an amazing opportunity for girls interested in STEM to connect with high-quality mentors and peers while gaining confidence in themselves. I am so grateful to have had this opportunity as a freshman, and I would highly recommend this program to any girls in high school.
June 5th - GWC Anti-Racism Statement
The Executive Committee of Girls Who Code at UM DCMB condemns the wrongful and tragic deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and so many others who have suffered and died at the hands of police brutality and structural racism. We echo statements from GWC national leadership, and promise to use our organization to protect and empower members of the Black community and those who, in addition to facing systemic racism daily, are underrepresented in computer science and STEM fields. We are working to improve our facilitator training to explicitly include anti-racism education and ensure we reflect these values in our weekly club meetings and other operations. We invite you to hold us accountable to this commitment by emailing thoughts, questions, or concerns to gwc.bioinfo-requests@umich.edu.
We want to share some anti-racism resources, and we encourage those not directly burdened by structural racism to become more informed and active allies. We know there are many resources being circulated through social media on anti-racism/allyship as well as self- and community-care; please email us at gwc.bioinfo-requests@umich.edu to share anything you think this group could benefit from reading. If you have an idea for how our organization can do a better job of responding to racism, please reach out and let us know.
The Inclusion Breakthrough by Frederick A Miller and Judy H. Katz – book offering methods for building a climate of inclusion
We recognize that racism impacts each of us differently and disproportionately. We don’t have all the answers, but we want our organization to be an agent of change.
In solidarity,
Brooke Wolford Zena Lapp Marlena Duda Vy Nguyen Negar Farzaneh Gabrielle Dotson Kelly Sovacool Hayley Falk Morgan Oneka Katie Furman Sarah Haynes April Kriebel Cynthia Zajac Hojae Lee Sophie Hoffman Audrey Drotos Maureen Sartor, PhD (Faculty Advisor) Cristina Mitrea, PhD (Faculty Advisor)
