Anna sappington’s first moments of fame came when she was a young girl, living in a home so full of pets she calls it a zoo. She grew up on the chesapeake bay, surrounded by a lush environment teeming with wildlife, and her father was an environmental scientist.Cognitive learning difficulties one day, when she found a frog in a skip laurel bush, she named him skippy and built him a habitat. Later on, she and skippy appeared on the animal planet TV special “what’s to love about weird pets?”

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Now a senior majoring in computer science and molecular biology, sappington has been chosen for another prestigious honor: she’s one of five MIT students selected this year to be marshall scholars.Cognitive learning difficulties she chose to study computer science because she wanted to have a role in pulling apart and understanding data, and she chose biology because of her lifelong fascination with nature, cells, genetic inheritance — and, of course, skippy.Cognitive learning difficulties

When she was a first-year student, sappington spent the year at the koch institute, working with a graduate student to determine how liver cells respond to infection by hepatitis B virus.Cognitive learning difficulties the summer after that, she went back to the NIH to contribute to a different project. This one still involved human health data, but it was more focused on building a computational tool.Cognitive learning difficulties sappington helped develop an algorithm that would quickly calculate how similar two genomes or proteins were to each other, a technology that could be used to screen for different bacteria strains in real-time.Cognitive learning difficulties

The main initiative of regev’s lab is an initiative called the human cell atlas, which was recently named science’s breakthrough of the year.Cognitive learning difficulties it’s like a layer on top of the human genome project, she says. They are working to identify and catalogue the different types of cells, such as skin cells and lung cells.Cognitive learning difficulties the need for the cataloging comes from the fact that even though these cells have the exact same DNA genome, they have different specialized functions, and therefore can’t be identified by genome alone.Cognitive learning difficulties

Because the human body contains so many different types of cells, teams of researchers work on different pieces. Sappington works on data analysis as part of a team that is classifying retinal cells.Cognitive learning difficulties it’s a unique challenge, she says, because the retina has more than 40 different types of cells, all of which respond to disease in different ways.Cognitive learning difficulties while still chipping away at human retinal cell types, her team contributed to a recently published retinal cell atlas for the macaque monkey.Cognitive learning difficulties for her undergraduate research career, sappington was named a 2018-2019 goldwater scholar.

Dance wasn’t the only aspect of the arts and humanities at MIT that she loved.Cognitive learning difficulties she is also a part of the burchard scholars program, which allows students with a particular interest in the humanities to explore that topic.Cognitive learning difficulties after she took a linguistics class with professor david pesetsky her first year, that field became her official humanities concentration. She ended up taking the next level of that class, which centered around syntax, and then she and five other students later created their own special subject class on linguistics.Cognitive learning difficulties

Outside of class, sappington has also been involved with techx, a student-run organization that is responsible for many of MIT’s tech-related events, including hackmit.Cognitive learning difficulties events also include the makeathon makemit, the spring career fair and technology demo xfair, and high school mentoring program THINK. After serving on and running an event committee, sappington served as the overall director for techx in her junior year.Cognitive learning difficulties while she’s no longer in charge, she’s still grateful to be part of the team.

After graduation, sappington will be heading off to university college london to earn her MS in machine learning.Cognitive learning difficulties her goal is to explore machine learning in a context that isn’t biology, so that she can learn new and different approaches that she might later be able to apply to biological challenges.Cognitive learning difficulties the second year of her marshall scholarship will be spent at cambridge university, where she will do a full year of research, likely involving machine learning applied to health care or other biological questions.Cognitive learning difficulties

Her ultimate goal is to find new and better ways to use machine learning and technology to improve the health care system. To that end, she aims to get her MD/phd after the next two years in england.Cognitive learning difficulties after volunteering at the massachusetts general hospital and shadowing doctors in the boston area, sappington is pretty certain she wants a career where she can interact with patients while still being involved with computer science and biology.Cognitive learning difficulties she’s excited to move forward with the next chapter of her life — but when it comes to leaving MIT, she’s got understandably mixed feelings.Cognitive learning difficulties