Angela
Angela
Phillips Academy
Andover, MA
Mentor:
Pablo Tamayo
Cancer Program
Angela grew up in Silicon Valley, which played a large role in her interest in science and technology. She was excited to spend a summer working in a world-class research facility with motivated scientists and peers. Angela’s project involved using hierarchical cluster analysis on lung cancer datasets generated at the Broad, with the goal of minimizing noise or over-fitting. Her method used a program called DISSECTOR to classify data into mutually exclusive subsets based on shared characteristics. Angela was also tasked with developing visual representations of the data, including heat maps, graphs of association matrices, and biplots that represented the strength of respective clusters.
Angela was extremely impressed with the overall culture at the Broad. “Everybody is hard-working but also very friendly and casual, which creates an enjoyable atmosphere,” said Angela. She is looking forward to attending college where she can continue to gain experiences in science and ultimately decide if she wants to pursue a STEM career.