Anna McCartan, from Leawood, KS, is pursuing a MS degree in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at the University College Cork in Cork, Ireland, and is representing District 5710 very well.
Here is Anna’s September report in her own words:
“Hi Mr. Graham,
September has been a busy but productive month. My final thesis project is due this week, on October 1st, so I am putting the final touches on my figures and citations before submitting in a few days.
Overall, the results have been very interesting. I found some significant patterns connecting bacterial diversity to age, pregnancy status, and BMI. The number and distribution of distinct species tends to change depending on these categories. In addition, species identity shifts considerably.
The exciting thing about this project is that it produces a concrete output that can be utilized in future studies. SeqBiome, the company I am working with, now has a 2000+ sample collection of quality-filtered sequences in storage, and future studies can be added to the database fairly easily. There’s more microbiome data being published all the time, so we can expect to see even clearer patterns as more papers on the topic emerge. This data can also be used to train machine learning classifiers, so in the future a model could take in sequencing data as an input and output a predicted age or pregnancy status.
It’s great to be on the home stretch for my written report, and then I’ll be working on a presentation for my defense next month. I am looking forward to returning to Cork to share my research with classmates and evaluators. I will be presenting in Cork on Friday, October 16, then heading back to Kansas City on the 20th!
All the best, Anna McCartan”
Thanks to District 5710 leadership for funding the Global Grant Scholarship program. It is always exciting to have an excellent scholar studying abroad and representing District 5710.