Full StoryMathematics and Statistics graduate student Woojeon Kim and team-mates have won the Spring 2023 Erdos Institute Project Competition.Mathematics and Statistics graduate student Woojeon Kim and team-mates have won the Spring 2023 Erdős Institute Project Competition.The Erdős Institute is a multi-university collaboration focused on helping PhDs get jobs they love at every stage of their career. Founded in 2017, the Institute helps train and place a diverse pool of graduate students, postdocs, and graduate alumni.In addition to bootcamps offering diverse training in things like data science, coding, and interview skills, the program offers students the opportunity to work in interdisciplinary and inter-university teams on projects posed by leaders in business, industry, and government. Thirty-four teams competed for the Spring 2023 competition. The five semi-finalists featured projects involving diverse projects: online video game recommendations, predicting vertebrate animal population densities, racial bias in oximeter readings, optimizing Los Angeles AirBnB revenue, and predicting protein function.Kim's team-mates included Brooks Miner, Ithaca College Associate Professor of Biology;Jaychandran Padayasi,Graduate Research Assistant in Physics, The Ohio State University;Kenny Chou, Data Scientist/Engineer with PhD in Biomedical Engineering (Computational Neuroscience) R&D Data Science & Wearables, GH Labs; Rohan Myers, Associate Data Analyst, CoverMyMeds; and Saad Khalid, Graduate Student in Physics, The Ohio State University.The project concerned the accuracy of finger-placed oximeters for measuring blood oxygen levels. Among people with darker skin pigments, these readings are frequently under-estimates when compared with the more reliable blood-sample based measurements. "The project provided me with a great opportunity to apply what I learned in statistics classes directly on actual data in the biological science field." said Kim.
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