The Coding it Forward Fellowship is empowering the next generation of technology leaders to innovate at the intersections of technology and public service in all levels of government offices across the United States. Fellows work across software engineering, data, design, and product to deliver service, improve systems, and strengthen products on behalf of the American people.
We are grateful for our host office partners who provided our cohort of 80 Fellows with the opportunity to serve and grow this summer:
Federal Offices:
- U.S. Department of Agriculture
- U.S. Census Bureau
- U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services
- General Services Administration
- Bureau of Justice Statistics
- Bureau of Labor Statistics
- Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services
State & Local Offices:
- Austin, TX: Transportation & Public Works Department
- Boston, MA: Department of Innovation and Technology, Mayor's Office of Housing
- New York City, NY: Department of City Planning; Mayor's Office for Economic Opportunity
- Portland, OR: Bureau of Technology Services
- Seattle, WA: City Budget Office
- Pima County, AZ: Health Department
- State of New Jersey: Office of Innovation
- State of Texas: Texas Education Agency
This repository features the slides that Fellows presented during their respective end-of-summer presentations at their host offices. View a recording of Coding it Forward’s Demo Day.
Kindly note that if a Fellow's biography does not have a link, their work is not publicly available. If a Fellow's biography contains a link without the actual PDF uploaded, their presentation is still under review for release.
Aishwarya Sreenivasan is a rising sophomore at The University of Texas at Austin, where she is pursuing degrees in Statistics & Data Science and Business Economics. This summer, Aishwarya worked for the Agricultural Marketing Service at the USDA, where she developed an awards dashboard for the Grants Division, enabling internal teams and stakeholders to efficiently visualize and gain insights on grant funding recipients. In collaboration with Fellow Stella Koh, she also contributed to various projects for the Local and Regional Foods Division, including creating a summary of the 2024 Environmental Scan Report, designing a state-level dashboard for the LFPA program, and visualizing data from the 2024 Farmer’s Market survey. | Presentation
Amanda Kwok is a senior at Johns Hopkins University studying Biomedical Engineering and Computer Science. This summer, she worked at the US Census Bureau, as a data analyst helping test, maintain, and create new analysis methods for the Demographic Analysis & Population Projection Software (DAPPS) created by the Training and Statistical Development branch of the Census. Her work will be incorporated into the next updated version of DAPPS after DAPPS 4.0. | Presentation
Amy Qiao is a rising junior at Brown University studying Mathematics and Computer Science. This summer, Amy worked at the General Services Administration’s Office of Customer Experience, conducting statistical analysis and creating data visualizations for two major GSA surveys. Her work helped to provide insights for GSA leadership to strengthen customer experience at the GSA and make incremental improvements to the way buyers and suppliers interact with the agency. | Presentation
Amy Wang is a rising junior at the Johns Hopkins University studying Applied Mathematics & Statistics and Computer Science. This summer, she worked at the Census Bureau in the Economic Directorate, alongside Rebecca Hutchinson, creating a retail spending by income level data product. Her work resulted in the development of a prototype for this data product.
Angela Chan is a recent graduate from the University of Florida with a M.S. degree in Information Systems and Operations Management. This summer, she worked at Census on the Strategic Portfolio Management office, working on testing and designing a customer relationship management tool for Census operations in Puerto Rico. In addition, she created online video and audio content for the official census.gov Puerto Rico profile page. | Presentation
Anna Capels is a rising senior at Colorado State University studying Psychology and Data Science. This summer, she worked at the US Census Bureau on the Associate Directorate for Economic Programs creating an OMR pipeline that preprocesses data and outputs it into usable formatting for further data linkage. Her work processed over 300 million data records, which aids the Decennial Census Digitization and Linkage (DCDL) Project in generating longitudinal datasets for novel research looking at behavior spanning from 1940-2020 within the US population. | Presentation
Anuraag Pandhi is a rising junior at Columbia University, where he is pursuing a Bachelor of Science in Operations Research: Financial Engineering and Computer Science, with a minor in Economics. This summer, he worked at the City of Boston on two key projects aimed at enhancing urban planning and administrative efficiency. On the LiDAR Data Automation project, Anuraag developed scripts and utilized GIS software to automate data processing, significantly reducing time and increasing accuracy in mapping and planning efforts. Additionally, he worked on automating routine workflows in Jupyter Notebooks, streamlining tasks such as user account deletion, email table merging, and credit tracking, leading to more efficient and error-free operations within city departments. | Presentation
Arkadeep Bandyopadhyay is a rising second-year master’s student at the University of Chicago pursuing a degree combining computer science and public policy. This summer, he worked as a data fellow at the City of Austin’s Transportation and Public Works Department, where he contributed to different workstreams related to the city’s mobility projects. His work resulted in two internal web applications, allowing city employees to extract information more quickly and make more informed decisions regarding project planning and execution. | Presentation
Audrey Chou is a rising junior at Brown University double majoring in Computer Science and Sociology. This summer, she worked at NYC Mayor's Office for Economic Opportunity on the Product team as a Design Fellow, alongside Michelle Le. She worked on a complete site redesign for the Workforce Data Portal. She led user research and prototyped a more intuitive and accessible user experience. | Presentation
Brandon Pardi is a recent Computer Science and Engineering graduate from University of California, Merced, beginning his Master's in Computer Science at University of California, Davis this Fall 2024. Over the summer, he worked at the U.S. Census Bureau with the Center for Enterprise Dissemination to solve the problem of determining benefits fulfillment from research papers that used Census data over a 10 week fellowship. | Presentation
Brandon Yee is a rising senior at Yale University studying Computer Science. This summer, he worked at Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, alongside Nicholas Jean and Ricardo Zamora. Brandon added several contributions to the repository metrics project, enabling developers to estimate the cost, time, and labor associated with software projects, and to the repository scaffolder project, which automates the input of required open-source documentation. He also added frontend tests to the dedupliFHIR Electron app. | Presentation
Charles Costanzo is a first-year Ph.D. student at The Pennsylvania State University studying Statistics. This summer, he worked at the Bureau of Justice Statistics in the Judicial Statistics Unit, where he improved the tracking system for a national data collection project and developed a forthcoming Just the Stats web report on federal immigration statistics. His work resulted in a 20% reduction in data collection tracking time and the first Just the Stats report to cover immigration. | Presentation
Charlie Liu is a rising senior at Columbia University studying Computer Science. This summer he worked at the General Services Administration on the USAgov WebOps team, helping to optimize their website performance and research, design, and implement a new documentation system. His work resulted in a 15%+ increase in web performance score as well as a newly structured GitHub wiki for the team to organize and grow their documentation. | Presentation
Chetan Boddeti is a rising sophomore at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign studying Computer Science + Economics. This summer, he worked at the US Census Bureau in the Economic Indicators Division helping develop a dashboard template to visualize published data in a new and engaging way. His work resulted in the created of an exciting dashboard template that can be extended on to various other sectors in the economy. | Presentation
Christina Brown is a current M.S. in Business Analytics student at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. This summer, she worked at the City of Portland’s Data Informed Decision Making Project team alongside Devin McDowall, migrating a Portland Fire Bureau dashboard from Tableau to Power BI. Her work improves access to data for Fire Bureau and Portland Street Response staff.
Ciara Horne is a recent graduate from the University of Virginia with a Ph.D. in Systems Engineering. This summer, she worked at the U.S. Census Bureau on the Enhancing Health Data (EHealth) Program team, developing geospatial data visualizations of national physician demographics. Her work will help the EHealth Program assess inequities in healthcare access for underserved communities.
Colton Lapp recently completed a M.S. degree in Public Policy and Management - Data Analytics from Carnegie Mellon University. This summer, he worked at the Census Bureau in the Local Government Finance team helping automate data processes related to the government finance data products. Collaborating with Census analysts, he developed Python code that automatically scraped financial audits for municipal governments from the internet and then extracted and classified the information in those audits to match Census classification standards. The tool that he built has the potential to free up dozens of hours of work every year and improve data consistency, and will hopefully be expanded to related processes within the Census.
Culiandra Nero is a rising senior at Tufts University who is double majoring in Child Studies & Human Development and Film & Media Studies. This summer, she worked at the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the Office of Productivity and Technology. She worked on Productivity 101 webpage rebrand, titled Productivity Classroom. This new webpage will teach high school students about productivity and its vital role in the economy. As visual design fellow, Culiandra used Adobe Illustrator to do a complete graphical overhaul of designs that already existed for the project, as well as create new designs to go along with several lessons of new material being introduced in the rebrand. She also provided educational consulting on the lesson plans made for the project. | Presentation
Daniel Grossberg is a rising junior at Oregon State University, majoring in Computer Science. This summer he worked with the City of Portland, Oregon on the eGov team to modernize and centralize legacy web forms from numerous city agencies into the newly launched Portland.gov site. His work resulted in over 250 meaningful community engagements with Portland residents.
Daniela Markazi is an Informatics PhD Candidate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. This summer, she worked as a User Researcher Fellow at the General Services Administration (GSA) within the Office of Customer Experience. She led a discovery research project to devise a better way to effectively share research, findings, and actionable insights across the GSA. Her work will be used to help inform an ideal outcome of giving GSA employees access to secondary research to inform new, primary research and empower cross-functional knowledge sharing. | Presentation | Courtney Brousseau ‘19 Community Builder Awardee
Elise Mutz is a recent graduate from the University of Colorado (Boulder) with a M.S. degree in Business Analytics. This summer, she worked at General Services Administration on the Analytics Team for the Office of Strategic Communication alongside Kristal Byrd. Her primary project used machine learning to find common themes in survey data. This work resulted in a model that was able to find areas to improve on the GSA website and a model that can be used for future projects.
Emi Viernes is a recent California State University Northridge graduate, perusing their masters this fall back at Northridge back in Computer Science. They interned at the host office of the GSA ITC for this summer. Their time was split between two main projects, one focused on redesigning low to no code solutions for an existing Emerging Tech Hub extension and Intranet page, partnered alongside a design fellow Mackey. As well as a secondary research based project involving the usage of Open AI to create a FAR contract assistant chatbot called FARsi, which lead to the testing of the Open AI Gov Azure Sandbox environment for the very first time and an individual web app for users to interact with the bot outside of the Azure playground. | [Presentation](Emi_Viernes Orozco.pdf)
Eric Kuo is a rising Junior at the University of Florida, studying Computer Science with a minor in statistics. This summer, he was a full stack software fellow in the Office of Employment and Unemployment Statistics at BLS, working on automating the MWR form validation process. His work saves the Data Collection Branch, 24 hours of total review time, 8 times a year. | Presentation
Fernando Panepinto Hattori is a rising junior at Vassar College majoring in Computer Science. This summer, he worked at General Service Administration's Office of Information Technology category. He worked on various projects, ranging from automating systems to vendor risk assessments to simulating attacks in the cyber range. | [Presentation](Fernando_Panepinto Hattori.pdf)
Hannah Wen is a third-year Data Science major at University of California, Davis. This summer, she worked as a contract Data Analyst fellow at the U.S. Census Bureau on the Annual Integrated Economic Survey (AIES) team within the Economy-Wide Statistics Division. Working alongside co-fellow Katharyn Loweth, she created a relational database of the communication strategies of 7 legacy economic surveys from 2015-2022. They performed an analysis of the communication methods in relation to respondent engagement and identified trends in engagement rates as well as engagement shelf life for different types of communication. They also provided recommendations regarding communication methods, record storage, and further research. | Presentation
Heng Jiang is a rising second-year graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University studying Public Policy and Management Data Analytics. This summer, he worked as a Data Engineering Fellow at the NYC Department of City Planning on the Data Engineering team, enhancing the data products released to the public by managing data pipelines, databases, metadata, and cloud infrastructure, as well as creating an interactive web page for the team's internal data ingestion. His work led to a redesigned data transformation workflow and improved quality assurance on the city's Zoning Tax Lot database. | Presentation
Henry Wu is a rising senior at Harvard College studying Statistics and Sociology. This summer, he worked with the City of Boston Mayor's Office of Housing, which is responsible for developing affordable housing in the city. Henry worked on two projects for the office: one analyzing the characteristics of Black in-migrants to and out-migrants from Boston, and one evaluating the relationship between the prevalence of income-restricted housing and neighborhood diversity and affordability.
Hieu Nguyen is a master's student at the University of Chicago studying Computer Science and Public Policy. This summer, he worked at Pima County on the Health Department, alongside Lidia Ghebreamlak, helping streamline respiratory illness dashboard updates in Qlik, analyze opioid overdose data, and manage health indicators. His work resulted in an automated end-to-end dashboard updates with documentation and a cleaned, annotated opioid overdose dataset with selected useful variables. | Presentation
Jack Oakes is a raising senior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This summer, he worked at the U.S. Census Bureau as a Data Scientist Fellow.
Jade Nair is a rising junior at Harvard College studying Computer Science and Government. This summer, she worked at the U.S. Census Bureau as part of the Enhancing Health Data (EHealth) Program, developing a long-term care data infrastructure using administrative records, census, and survey data. Her work laid the foundation for continued research that can enhance our understanding of long-term care residents and facilities. | Presentation
Jena Bhandari is a rising junior at the University of Southern California studying Computer Science. This summer, she worked as a full-stack engineer at the U.S. Census Bureau in the Economic Reimbursable Surveys Division, focusing on improving the accuracy and coverage of justice facility data. Their contributions included developing a web application and migrating databases. Their work supported the upcoming 2030 Census and integration with external agencies. | Presentation
Jenna Braun is a Data Science undergraduate going into her last semester at the University of California, Berkeley. This summer she worked with the Demographic Frames Team at the US Census alongside Michael Jiang to optimize their source management system. Her work was responsible for datatable loads. | Presentation
Jessica Huang is a master's student at San Jose State University for Human Factors/Ergonomics. This summer, she worked at New York City Department of Planning on the Geographic Data and Engineering team, alongside Wendy Li, guiding individuals on creating sustainable digital products with long term impacts. Her work in creating a new design system, Streetscape, sets a foundation for NYC DCP's modernization of their wide assortment of digital tools and products. She then was able to apply Streetscape to design deliverables for Application Engineering and Data Engineering for four projects within a span of 10 weeks. | Presentation
Jessica Lin is a recent graduate from the University of Pennsylvania with a M.S. degree in Integrated Product Design. This summer, she was a Design Fellow at US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), where she worked on creating time efficiencies and improving visibility and tracking for support staff servicing cases and sending service documents to downstream DHS partners.
Jude Ha is a rising junior at Harvard University studying Computer Science. This summer, she worked at the Associate Directorate for Demographic Programs to automate data file creation for the Census Household Panel survey, a high frequency national panel.
Karen Lin is a recent graduate from Yale University with a B.S. degree in Computer Science and History of Art. This summer, she worked at the General Services Administration, Technology Transformation Services on the Digital.gov team as a front-end engineer. During her fellowship, Karen restructured search results on Digital.gov to return up-to-date content and ideated, developed, and shipped the Communities of Practice (CoP) Job Board. Her job board aims to decrease email spam from CoP emailings lists by 25%, increase retention rates in each CoP, and increase usage of the Digital.gov website. | Presentation
Katharyn Loweth is a second-year master’s student at Georgetown University studying Data Science for Public Policy. This summer, she worked as a Data Analyst fellow at the U.S. Census Bureau on the Annual Integrated Economic Survey (AIES) team within the Economy-Wide Statistics Division. Working alongside co-fellow Hannah Wen, she analyzed survey communication strategies and the relationship between survey outreach and respondent engagement. They created a relational database of the communication strategies of 7 legacy economic surveys from 2015-2022 and used R to identify trends in communication and engagement across a survey collection period. Their work also resulted in recommendations for communication methods and record storage, and suggestions for further research. | Presentation
Katie Spoon is a 5th year PhD candidate and NSF Graduate Research Fellow in Computer Science at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is also pursuing a Master's in Education Policy. This summer, she worked as a Data Fellow at the U.S. Census Bureau in the Enhancing Health Data group, alongside Jade Nair and Ciara Horne, in order to identify which communities in the U.S. are at most risk of declining physician access in the future. | Presentation
Kaustubh Harnoor is a rising senior at UC Santa Cruz studying Computer Engineering. This summer, he worked at the US Census Bureau on the Business Formation Statistics (BFS) team. His work resulted in an automated, future-proof workflow and algorithm for the BFS team to increase the data they can process by 4-5 times and to save over 20-25 hours each month. | Presentation
Ken Lam, a rising junior at Hamilton College majoring in Data Science, spent this summer at the U.S. Census Bureau within the Statistics Modernization Branch. There, he assisted senior leadership in creating a user-friendly dashboard that delivered both high-level and detailed summaries of the Annual Integrated Economic Survey data. By leveraging open-source technologies like R for automation and RMarkdown for reproducible, customizable dashboards, his efforts resulted in significant time and cost savings. | Presentation
Kevin Gui is a rising Junior at the University of California, Davis studying Data Science and Economics. This summer, he worked at the US Census Bureau under the International Programs Center, alongside his supervisors Britta Schumacher and Vania Wang, helping to build a report export feature for the Open Source Dissemination System. These functionalities will allow users in low- and middle-income countries to disseminate their census data better. He also worked on a Natural Language Processing project for the HIV/AIDS Review and Verification System (HARVEST), classifying documents between having relevant HIV/AIDS statistics and not having them. These efforts lighten the workload of current employees who must analyze these documents individually. | Presentation
Linda (L) Yang is a rising senior at UCLA studying Economics, Digital Humanities, and Statistics/Data Science. This summer, she worked at the Bureau of Justice Statistics in the Law Enforcement Statistics Unit, processing and visualizing Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS 2020) and Federal Law Enforcement Agency Deaths in Custody Reporting Program (FDCRP 2020) data using Python, JavaScript, R, and Tableau. Her work resulted in a prototype enabling the public to make comprehensive comparisons of 3,462 sampled law enforcement agencies against national benchmarks.
Laura Jabr is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in computer science with a concentration in data science and machine learning. This summer, she worked with the RAIO IDEA team at USCIS to analyze the impact of technology changes on Affirmative Asylum case processing times. She also created machine learning models with the Text Analytics team to explore trends in cases over time. Lauren Chu is a rising junior at the University of California, Berkeley, studying Data Science. This summer, she worked at the US Department of Agriculture on the Enterprise Data Management Center team, where she developed and implemented a comprehensive Tableau dashboard to visualize nuanced USDA time to hire data. In her role, she analyzed over 170,000 data points, detailing process steps, hiring drops, percentile rankings, and trends across various areas. Her work enabled senior Human Resources Management staff to provide evidence to key stakeholders of their successful hiring intervention strategies.
Leonor Alcaraz is a recent graduate from UC Berkeley with a Masters in Information Management and Systems. This summer, she worked at USCIS on the Global Interview Notes and Assessment tool (GINA) team. She focused on addressing pain points officers faced when navigating between a completed assessment and submitting the assessment. Her work resulted in feature updates within GINA, which will decrease the time and cognitive load required to complete this process.
Zhuo Biao (Leven) Cai is a graduate student in the online Master of Computer and Information Technology at University of Pennsylvania. This summer, he worked as a Data Analyst Fellow at the U.S. Census Bureau. His work focused on developing interactive visualizations of Public Sector data to allow users to explore information about government organization, finance, public employment, and payroll.
Liam Cummings, a rising senior at the Illinois Institute of Technology majoring in computer science, recently completed a summer internship at the General Services Administration (GSA), working on Digital.gov. During his internship, Liam collaborated closely with the development team, concentrating on code refactoring and feature implementation. His primary focus was on making the codebase more modular to support the transition to the Drupal content management system (CMS). Through his efforts, Liam successfully reduced approximately 1500 lines of code to around 700 by applying modular design principles.
Lidia Ghebreamlak is a PhD student at the Iowa State University studying Computer Science. This summer, she worked at Pima County on the Health Department, alongside Hieu Nguyen, helping the department streamline and automate tribal data extraction and geoprocessing and manage health indicators. Her work resulted in an automated end-to-end data processing pipeline extensively reducing manual processing time and human intervention in the process. | Presentation
Lizett Aguilar is a graduate student at the University of Michigan, studying Public Policy and Information Science with a focus on big data analytics. This summer, she worked at the State of Texas with the Texas Education Agency, participating in the early stages of a program evaluation of the following early literacy initiatives: Reading Academies and High Quality Instructional Materials. Her work resulted in a stronger foundation for future program evaluations by the agency. | Presentation
Lizzy Zhang is a recent graduate from Brown University with a B.A. in Computer Science and Biology. This summer, she worked at the New Jersey State Office of Innovation on the Resident Experience Initiative. At the Office, she led the engineering effort to translate the New Jersey Web Design System into web components, enabling engineers to use the design system more effectively. In addition, she helped develop a pilot version of an eviction protection tool to inform residents about the eviction process and connect them directly to assistance. | Presentation
Lucy King is a rising junior at Columbia University studying Computer Science. This summer, she worked with the Census Bureau's Economic Indicators Division as a Full-Stack Engineering Fellow, developing a user interface to improve access to the Census Bureau's International Trade API. Her web application provides a key resource for increasing access to trade data for public agencies, academic researchers, and members of the public, and also reduced the burden on the EID team who provide support to users who struggle with the API. | Presentation
Luke Wang is a recent graduate from Duke University studying statistics and economics. This summer, he worked at the U.S. Census Bureau on the Center for Economic Studies alongside Lead Economist Andrew Foote, helping the Jobs Frame program meet their internal and external data consistency gaps.
Mackey is a rising senior at SCAD studying User Experience (UX) and Graphic Design. This summer, she worked at the General Services Administration in MAS ITC completing a variety of design assignments to enhance the visual communications of the branch. Her work resulted in significantly improved user interfaces and more cohesive visual branding, making information more accessible and engaging. Her efforts not only enhanced the overall efficiency of the branch's communication but also received positive feedback from both colleagues and stakeholders, demonstrating her growing expertise and impact in the field of UX and graphic design. | Presentation
Manasa Jagadeesh is a graduate student at the University of Michigan, studying Human-Computer Interaction, and Science and Technology Policy. She is passionate about using her technical skills in the civic technology space to create human-centered and data-driven solutions. This summer, Manasa worked with the City of Boston's Boston Digital Service team to create a roadmap for the city's Web Analytics practice that touches all of the city's digital products. | Presentation
Mandy Sun is a senior at Georgetown University studying Computer Science with a minor in Film and Media Studies. She is also pursuing an accelerated masters in Data Science and Analytics. This summer, she worked at the Bureau of Justice Statistics as a data fellow. She worked on integrating 40 years of data onto the Justice Expenditure and Employment tool (JEET) while streamlining the dashboard design. Her work will contribute to the ongoing improved iterations of the JEET published to the public. | Presentation
Michael Jiang is a rising senior at UCLA studying Computer Science and Linguistics. This summer, he worked with the Demographics Frame team at the US Census alongside Jenna Braun to optimize their source management system. His work was responsible for database process automation. | Presentation
Michael Rosenbaum is a current masters candidate in Computational Analysis and Public Policy at the University of Chicago. This summer, he supported analytics projects at the Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) at the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). His work at USDA primarily focused on developing measures of equitable access to programs, creating pipelines for data from mission areas, and integrating those data into dashboards of program utilization.
Michelle Le is a rising senior at Connecticut College majoring in Computer Science and minoring in Economics. This summer, she worked at NYC Mayor's Office for Economic Opportunity on the Product team as a Software Engineering Fellow, alongside Audrey Chou. She worked on rebuilding the website for Workforce Data Portal by implementing user-friendly and responsive UI components. | Presentation
Miles Wang is a rising junior at the University of California, Berkeley studying data science. This summer, he worked at the Department of Justice in the Bureau of Justice Statistics division, helping the BJS make National Crime Victimization Survey data more publicly accessible. | Presentation
Nicholas Jean is a rising senior at University of California, Berkeley studying Computer Science. This summer, he worked at Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, alongside Ricardo Zamora and Brandon Yee. Nicholas developed a multimodal LLM assistant via Ollama to help users navigate the office's Murals, created the brand identity for CMS's dedupliFHIR Electron app by designing its icon, added new Cookiecutter CLI variables for the MAINTAINERS.md in the repo-scaffolder project, and used the GitHub API to fetch data on the predominant languages of repositories in the repository metrics project. | Presentation]
Olivia Luk is a recent graduate from Carnegie Mellon University's School of Design where she studied Communication Design with minors in Human-Computer Interaction and Gender Studies. This summer she worked on the Data and Technology Services Team at the City of Austin TX's Department of Transportation and Public Works, to conduct usability testing, and prototype design improvements for a newly launched map on Moped, a platform that manages all of the city's mobility infrastructure projects. As the sole designer on this team she was the first to evaluate and provide design feedback on this feature. | Presentation
Pauline Nguyen is a senior at Brown University studying Computer Science. This summer, she worked at the U.S. Census Bureau, alongside Amanda Kwok, as a front-end engineer helping to improve the usability of Demographic Analysis & Population Projection Software (DAPPS). Her work addressed user pain points provided in workshop feedback and will also be incorporated in the next version of DAPPS. | Presentation
Peter Kirgis is a second-year Master in Public Affairs student at Princeton University. This summer, he worked at the U.S. Census Bureau in the Public Sector Statistical Methods Branch, using data science techniques to evaluate and explore alternatives to the imputation methodology used to estimate missing data. His research serves as a jumping-off point for a long-term imputation modernization effort at the Branch. | Presentation
Reem Khalid is a rising junior at Northwestern University studying Computer Science. This summer, she worked at the U.S. Census Bureau with the Demographic and Economic Studies (DES) Branch. Her work involved developing a data visualization dashboard that streamlines the analysis and review of population estimates and projections (E&Ps) for the International Database (IDB). By automating the generation of reports and visualizations, Reem’s contributions have enhanced the ability of analysts to quickly identify trends, anomalies, and errors in demographic data.
Ricardo Zamora is a recent graduate from Wesleyan University with a B.A. degree in Computer Science. This summer, he worked at Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, alongside Nicholas Jean and Brandon Yee. Ricardo laid the groundwork for establishing code.json as an agency-wide metadata standard by adding Cookiecutter prompts to generate code.json files with project metadata. He also worked on both the backend and frontend of the metrics site, creating a new API endpoint for the project code.json fields, adding sorting and filtering features based on project data to improve user experience, and visualizing top committers for each organization. | Presentation
Rishi Shah is a rising junior at Yale College studying Applied Mathematics and Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry. This summer, he worked at the Office of Enterprise Data & Analytics at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) where he applied data science techniques to study predictors of heat-related illness among Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries. He also helped develop a dashboard to support both short-term emergency planning and long-term recovery analysis. This dashboard allows users to visualize various metrics by geography for the Medicare, Medicaid, and Marketplace populations.
Robert Koch is a recent graduate from Brown University with a B.S. degree in Computer Science. This summer, he worked at the General Services Administration on the Vote.gov team. He, along with William, contributed to a variety of different features and improvements for the new version of Vote.gov and the National Voter Registration Form filler tool. Many of these improvements were related to expanding information and enhancing accessibility functionality across both projects.
Ronith Ranjan is a graduate of the University of Virginia where he studied Computer Science, Political & Social Thought, and Economics (minor). He loves reading and writing about the role of technology in society’s prosperity in the past, present, and future. This summer, Ronith worked with the City of Boston’s Analytics team to create an analytics strategy for the Boston open data portal and conduct initial user exploration. | Presentation
Ross Lauterbach is a current student at Hunter College pursuing his MA in Statistics. This summer, he worked at the U.S. Census Bureau as a Data Science Fellow, supporting the Trade Regululations Branch in determining the accuracy of collected trade data. His work included statistical analysis of the supply chain, management and cleaning of >200gb of trade data, and implementation of classification models to determine a Country of Origin for a transaction. He finished off the summer by providing his findings and a recommendation to the Associate Director of Economic Programs.
Samuel Fleet recently graduated from the University of Washington with an M.S. in Human-Centered Design and Engineering. This summer, he worked as a user researcher supporting the Digital Service team in creating a holistic overview of the current experience for businesses working with the city through co-leading external research with suppliers. This work resulted in a report and blueprint outlining 8 key supplier experience requirements, which are being used to evaluate future platform options for the city supplier portal.
Shivi Jain is a rising junior at UPenn studying Computer Science. This summer she worked at the USDA, in the OCIO office, collaborating with the FSIS and ARS agencies to use Machine learning tools to identify the harmful Serotypes of Salmonella. This included an outbreak-based approach as well as a gene-based approach.
Stella Koh is a rising junior at the University of California, Los Angeles studying Statistics & Data Science and Business Economics. This summer, she worked at the USDA as a Data Analyst Fellow, creating an automated data flow to clean and transform funding data from the Specialty Crop Block Grant Program (SCBGP) database to a live dashboard. Her work has greatly supported internal team decision-making by centralizing access to accurate data and new insights. Along with fellow Aishwarya Sreenivasan, she also helped build an R Shiny dashboard to identify noncompetitive funding gaps for the 2024 USDA Tech Hackathon and created visualizations for various Local and Regional Foods Division (LRFD) teams to be used in public infographics and reports. | Presentation
Theodore Jeliazkov is a rising sophomore at Cornell University studying statistics. This summer, he worked at the General Services Administration on the IT Category team of the Federal Acquisition Service, developing machine learning models to analyze government spending. His work has the potential to reduce the time needed for essential recurring projects from a few weeks to a few seconds. | Presentation
Tung Lin is a recent graduate from UCLA with a B.S. in Cognitive Science. This summer, she worked at the Office of Information Technology Category on the Enterprise Intelligence Division helping the data division understand and build new tools for government procurement analysis. Her work resulted in a better understanding of available FPDS-related tools and the development of a keyword analysis tool. | Presentation
Tyson Cheung is a rising junior at the University of Maryland, College Park studying Computer Science and Immersive Media Design. This summer, he worked at the U.S. General Services Administration with the Digital.gov team at Technology Transformation Services (TTS). Tyson focused on streamlining the sign-up process for Digital.gov's Communities of Practice (CoPs) by implementing an automated system using Qualtrics and ZenDesk. His work is expected to significantly improve user experience for government employees joining CoPs and enhance community management efficiency across Digital.gov. | Presentation
Fanshuhan (Vicky) Xu is a rising junior at Northwestern University, studying Computer Science and Art History. This summer, she worked at the Seattle City Budget Office on the Innovation and Performance team. As a data fellow, her primary role was to develop an integrated dashboard using Python and Tableau for cross-functional, collaborative analysis. The dashboard handles geospatial data and includes features such as time-based analysis, offering both high-level and granular insights. It also provides early warnings of systemic changes in specific neighborhoods. Throughout the process, she worked closely with stakeholders, collecting feedback to continuously refine and enhance the dashboard. | Presentation
Wendy Li is a first-year master's student studying Information Experience Design at Pratt Institute. This summer, she worked at New York City Department of City Planning on the Geographic Data and Engineering team, alongside Jessica Huang, guiding individuals on creating sustainable digital products with long term impacts. There, she worked on various projects, spanning for designing public-facing tools to be more accessible to creating designs that support internal teams. Most notably, her work in redesigning the organization's design system sets a foundation for design within NYC DCP heading forward. | Presentation
William Kwon is a rising junior at Purdue University studying Computer Science. This summer, he worked at General Services Administration on the Vote.gov team. He, along with Robert, contributed to revamping the Vote.gov website and the National Voter Registration Form filler tool. He helped in implementing features as well as improving accessibility.
Winston Li is a rising junior at UCLA studying Statistics and Data Science and Political Science. This summer, he worked at the U.S. Census Bureau's Economic Statistical Methods Division, developing a private large language model pipeline to effectively analyze Census documents, surveys, and reports. His work resulted in significant improvements in model accuracy and relevance over existing solutions, while also allowing for the offline, secure analysis of confidential data. | Presentation
Zyail Pritchett is a recent graduate from Michigan State University, where she majored in Human Biology. This summer, she worked at the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) as a Data Analytics Intern in the Criminal Justice Data Improvement Programs Unit, where she focused on analyzing and visualizing grant data to support state justice programs with over 4 million dollars in funding. Her work contributed to enhancing the efficiency of grant management and providing valuable insights into funding allocations across various states.
Please contact our team with any questions.