evan_zhu

Day 8, Thank you

Today was the last day of my WEP. Our final TEAMS meeting was held much later than usual, 3:00 pm, due to Dr. Summerville having a long day of meetings. Today was a nice and easy wrap up where I showed her the result of me cleaning up all the data and then turning the paper which summarized everything I had did and worked on for her over the past 2 weeks. After the logistics, I gave my thanks for her taking time everyday to give me this work experience and then she encouraged me to reach out to her whenever I just wanted any help or to chat. I would have loved it if this experience was in-person, but it being virtual was still a very unique and precious experience.

Day 7

Today in our teams meeting, I showed Dr. Summerville the data on maternal milk and formula and then asked her questions about the research paper that I would turn in. Dr. Summerville clarified many things and then assigned me to transpose the huge dataset that had more than 10,000 cells. I knew it would be a daunting tasks to I made sure to start as soon as possible. I quickly had many questions so I was able to clarify everything through email.

Day 6

On day six, I got a virtual tour of the building Dr. Summerville and her team resided. They were on the 3rd floor because their usual fifth floor was being renovated. I got to see the huge cafeteria and just get a sense of the personality of the people at SAS from the many paintings and even the statues of Yoda and Darth Vader. It is just a shame that I was not able to see it in person. My assignment for this day was to write a paper which summarized everything that I had done before, very similar to what we have been doing with the blogs.

Day 5

Day 5 started with another Teams meeting. In the meeting, I shared with Dr. Summerville the information I found on raw data and for-profit milk banks. For the milk banks, I found two banks under the company Prolacta Bioscience. These banks sell human milk to hospitals and also pay mothers who donate. The company researches and develops human milk-based nutritional products that would not be possible with a non-profit business model. In terms of raw data, I could not find any of the CSV files as all the papers only had tables and graphs which are considered summaries and are too simplified to actually do any data analysis on them. My assignment was to find raw data on the differences of the nutritional value of formula versus human milk. I also needed to find how much the for-profit milk banks make.

Day 4

On the fourth day, I started with a Teams call to show the list of research papers about Bacillus in human milk donations. From the papers, I learned that Bacillus cereus is the most common bacteria that causes milk donations to be disposed of. During the meeting, Dr. Summerville explain to me that the papers all had summaries of data and what we needed was to look for raw data so we could analyze it. She said that raw data would be a csv (comma separated values) file which I would then need to convert to excel. My assignment for the day was to look for this raw data and also to research milk banks that were for-profit instead of nonprofit and just learn how they functioned.

Day 3

On day 3, Dr. Summerville and I sorted out all the technical difficulties so that there would no longer be any problems with communication and scheduling. I learned today that when you are accused of doing something that you didn’t do, its best to stay calm, apologize, and quickly try to explain everything as clearly as possible.

Today, we optimized the excel sheet I did and reduced all the unnecessary steps when filling out the excel sheet so that a volunteer would have the easiest time. My assignment was then to research any papers or articles about bacillus bacteria in maternal milk. I must find any papers that could be helpful or have any data which can help in out process so we can see if there are any trends.

Day 2

On day 2, I had some technical difficulties where I could not receive any of the emails Dr. Summerville had sent so we were not able to meet. I ended up continuing to look for the converters with free-trails but they all ended up not working. We then opted to not use converters and just take down data manually.

Day 1

On day 1, I had a Teams meeting with Dr. Summerville to discuss the work I had done over the weekend. What I did was copy all the information, from the questions and answers, of four different donor forms for the WakeMed Mothers’ Milk Bank. We discussed the time it took and knew it was unreasonable to have a volunteer manually read the 2400 forms there are, so we tried to find a pdf to excel converter. All the free converters online made very hard to read sheets so we opted to find converters with a free trial or ones that may be more expensive.

When the mothers donate milk, all their milk is then mixed together and then sent to a lab. If the milk is tested positive for a specific bacteria, it is then disposed of. The goal is to extract data from these forms to then be able to use data analytics to help see what kinds of donors are more at risk of their milk containing a specific bacteria and then make the best possible mixture.

Day 0 – Prework

During the next 2 weeks, I will be working with Dr. Natalia Summerville from SAS on a Data4Good project which seeks to use data analytics in a way to help society instead of solely for profit. The project I will be helping seeks to aid in optimizing the maternal milk donation process. My prework was to look over 4 different donor forms and manually type out all the information into an excel sheet. Then, I had to research some free-online pdf to excel converters to see if I can streemline this process.