Biostatistics students concluded their Data+ summer research experience with a poster session and presentation. Data+ is a ten-week summer research experience for Duke undergraduate and masters students interested in exploring new data-driven approaches to interdisciplinary challenges. It is part of the Information Initiative at Duke (iiD).
Students join small project teams working alongside other teams in a communal environment. They learn how to marshal, analyze, and visualize data, while gaining broad exposure to the modern world of data science. They work in small teams but in a communal environment with other teams working in an extremely diverse set of subject areas. Students are able to both work deeply in their specific project and get a very broad picture of most of the skills needed for modern data science. As part of a Research Training Grant issued by the NSF to the Departments of Mathematics and Statistical Science at Duke, students receive a $5,000 stipend.
Cliburn Chan and Megan Neely served as faculty sponsors for the Molecular Atlas of Lung Development (LungMAP) project. Biostats student Lina Yang, together with Duke undergraduates Pablo Ortiz and Vivek Sriram, developed an OpenCV pipeline to segment over one thousand immunofluorescent images of developing mouse lungs in the LungMAP database, and were able to automatically identify both structural and cellular features in the images. In order to select the appropriate segmentation rules for each image, the students build a database containing information about each image’s stage, fluorescent antibody probes used and other image metadata. Lina intends to continue researching the interaction of statistical learning and image processing after Data+.
