Kees S
- Research Program Mentor

MS candidate at Tufts University

Expertise

Epidemiology, Statistics, Statistical Programming (R, SAS, Python), Data Science, Nutrition, GIS (ArcGIS, QGIS)

Bio

Hi, my name is Kees and I'm a second-year Masters student at Tufts University. My degree is in Nutritional Epidemiology and Data Science, and I have an undergraduate degree in Biomedical Engineering. I have experience with intro level chemistry, biological sciences, and scientific writing, but most of my expertise falls under programming in R, SAS, and Python, literature review of scientific articles, statistics and data science, and epidemiology of infectious and chronic diseases. Though most of my work is based in data science, programming, and epidemiology, I still enjoy literature. During my time as an undergraduate, I played soccer as a goalkeeper at a Division I school, so I'm happy to talk about balancing athletics and academics at college. Other than that, I enjoy picking up new skills (hence the programming background), and using new skills to approach difficult and interesting problems. I am currently working on publishing a research paper on day of the week fluctuations in COVID-19 data, and am in the process of writing a literature review on the effects of plant-based diets on various chronic diseases and nutrition problems.

Project ideas

Project ideas are meant to help inspire student thinking about their own project. Students are in the driver seat of their research and are free to use any or none of the ideas shared by their mentors.

Geospatial Analysis of Pollution in the United States

This general project would introduce students to a programming language such as R or Python, and a geographical information software like QGIS (or ArcGIS Pro for a $100 yearly license fee). Students would learn where to find open-source geospatial data, clean, edit, and make new variables of interest with this data source, and apply this data in QGIS to map sources of pollution to various areas. This analysis could be linked to environmental justice (which demographic groups are most affected by US pollution sources), hotspot analysis of which areas have worse pollution, which pollution sources are the most harmful, and identification of characteristics of areas that have the greatest amount of pollution

Coding skills

R, Python, SAS, a little bit of Matlab but I haven't used it in a long time

Teaching experience

I give weekly workshops on programming in R, have taught multiple intro to R workshops, and have mentored other students in statistical programming in SAS. I've also mentored one student throughout my research project on analyzing day of the week fluctuations in COVID-19 data

Credentials

Work experience

American College of Lifestyle Medicine (2020 - Current)

Data extraction consultant

Tufts University (2020 - Current)

Student COVID-19 Researcher

Education

Yale University

BS Bachelor of Science (2019)

Biomedical Engineering

Tufts University

MS Master of Science candidate

Nutritional Epidemiology and Data Science

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Kees S - Research Program Mentor