Role: Alumni

Rafaela Flor recently graduated with her PhD in Biomedical and Veterinary Sciences at Virginia Tech, where she worked in Dr. Kylene Kehn-Hall’s lab.

Marissa Buccilli recently earned her PhD in Rhetoric and Writing from Virginia Tech. Her research interests include the rhetoric of science, health, and medicine; health humanities; and technical communication. She brings experience in instructional design, qualitative research, and projects that support community-engaged health initiatives, with a particular focus on how language shapes clinical and scientific … Read more

Lauren recently completed her Master of Public Health at Virginia Tech, following her Bachelor’s degree in Public Health. She worked with the National Institutes of Health during her graduate training, where she contributed to clinical trial dashboard analyses and supported pandemic preparedness initiatives through various organizational projects. She is passionate about advancing public health, particularly … Read more

My name is Sanjana Gummalla and I am a rising junior at Virginia Tech, majoring in Computer Science with a minor in Biomedical Engineering. I’m deeply interested in using CS and Data Science/AI in healthcare, so I’m super excited to work as an intern at NSF Compass Center and use data science and machine learning … Read more

Lindsay Harvey is a junior at the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health. She is a part of the sequencing team in the Lauring Lab. In her free time she enjoys running in the arb, reading The New York Times, and hanging out with her roommates.

Tiki Kazeem is a rising junior at Yale University where she studies Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry with a concentration in Medicine. She is part of the University of Michigan’s SMART summer program, which focuses on helping students explore careers as a physician-scientist. This summer, she is working in the Lauring Lab under the supervision of … Read more

I am currently pursuing my Master’s degree in Computer Science at Virginia Tech and am excited to continue exploring research in machine learning and AI. During my internship at the NSF COMPASS Center, I worked on Transformer-based genomic machine learning pipelines, preprocessing over 500K genomic sequences and fine-tuning BERT models (specifically HAVEN). This experience strengthened my … Read more

Sarayu is a recent graduate of Virginia Tech, where she earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Computational Modeling and Data Analytics with a concentration in Biological Sciences and an Honors Laureate Diploma. During the NSF COMPASS Internship Program, she contributed to a broader organizational effort focused on advancing pandemic prediction and prevention through computational … Read more

Mira Chaplin received her PhD at the University of Michigan in 2025. She is currently a Postdoctoral fellow at Eawag (the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology), where she studies virus behavior in onsite water treatment processes. Her PhD focused on predicting virus reduction in chlorination and coagulation treatment, using laboratory methods and … Read more