Sana (she/her) is a senior majoring in Statistics and minoring in Mathematics. On campus, she has been involved with the Peer Allies through Honors program since her freshman year as a mentee in the program. She has since served as the PR and Marketing Coordinator and the current Co-Head Coordinator. She is also a volunteer crisis counselor for the Crisis Text Line, an online chat support line for those in immediate mental health need.

Sana’s research interests include public health, biostatistics, and social determinants of health. She was a member of Dr. Tania Huedo-Medina’s lab in the Allied Health department during her sophomore year, working on meta- analysis statistical plots.

Following this experience, she joined Dr. Roman Shrestha’s lab in the Allied Health department, where she is currently working on projects involving HIV prevention and Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis outreach in nations such as Malaysia and Nepal. This role allowed Sana to co-author two papers, one of which was discussed in a UConn Today Article. She also presented at the Spring Frontiers in Undergraduate Research Exhibition on this topic.

Sana is also a member of Dr. Ofer Harel’s research group in the department of Statistics. She is working on her Honors thesis, in which she is working on developing a novel imputation strategy for compositional incomplete data. Sana is also a part of Cohort 21 of the UConn IDEA Grant program, which is enabling this research project.

For the past three summers, Sana has been an intern at Pfizer in Groton, CT. Her experiences at Pfizer have motivated a passion for pharmaceutical research from a statistics standpoint.

Sana has approached undergraduate research in several different ways, and she is excited about sharing her experiences and helping students find the research experiences best for them. Reach out to Sana to if you need any advice on getting involved in undergraduate research, research-based internships, OUR funding opportunities, and more!