Well, I did it! After 2 years completing my SM and 3 years in the PhD program in Engineering Systems at MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, I successfully defended my dissertation – entitled Modeling Transmission Heterogeneity for Infectious Disease Outbreaks – this past week. I’ll be taking about 3 weeks off before starting my new position as a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard’s Health Policy Data Science Lab in early September, where I’ll be working with Dr. Sherri Rose on combining causal inference methods with non-traditional digital disease data sources for public health surveillance. It’s been a wild ride, and I couldn’t feel more blessed. Thank you – all of you – who have supported me (far and wide) throughout this journey. Onward and upward!
