Lavanya Uppala
- Scott Scholar
- UNO, Information Science & Technology
Additional Information
Bio
Lavanya is from Omaha, NE, and is studying bioinformatics, biology, and computer science, chemistry, and medical humanities.
Her non-profit experience includes partnering with Open Door Mission. As a community action project, her team deployed a web application that aims to increase retention rates in facility social service programs by better connecting homeless individuals with employees of the shelter and their schedules. Homeless individuals must often depend on public transportation, which may not be timely or may be difficult to manage in addition to childcare or other stressors of homelessness, in turn causing them to miss important appointments. These appointments, scheduled in assistance with the Open Door Mission, help clients rise out of poverty, and bridge the roughly $20,000 gap between self-sustainability and dependence on government aid.
An appointment display board that better connects individuals to their schedules may help mitigate this issue. Accordingly, through this project, they aimed to help clients of the sheltered bridge the income gap, which in turn will reduce rates of relapse into homelessness in the Omaha metro area. They eventually hope to make this application more widely available and implement the software statewide through a partnership with MACCH (the Metro Area Continuum of Care). Her leadership experience includes serving as a representative and president of the Honors Student Association at UNO. In this role, she works with faculty to plan and execute events that promote a sense of community in the honors program.
She has also volunteered at campus events that showcase the importance of sustainable practices. Her internship experience includes volunteering at the University of Nebraska Medical Center to gain insight into the medical field. In this role, she trained volunteers, ensured patient comfort, and completed general administrative tasks for doctors and nurses. She has also previously worked as a research assistant in the Computer Science Lab at UNO, where she trained artificial intelligence to detect digital information such as terrorist images on websites or Tweets related to cancer.
This summer 2021, she will work for the NIH INBRE Fellowship, facilitated by Dr. Tapprich at UNMC. In this role, she will be researching to help characterize a novel podovirus, UNO-SLW2, using bioinformatics methodologies. She will also participate in lecture and speaker series to learn more about different fields of biomedical research, and present her research at a conference at the end of the summer. This internship is part of a 2-year program and will continue during the academic year.
Her research experience includes working in the Bioinformatics Lab at the UNO, under the guidance of Dr. Kathryn Cooper. She is currently working on using bioinformatics algorithms to analyze frameshift mutations of critical nucleotides in different viruses, which are then used to identify genomic sources of pathogenicity in different strains of the virus. She has received the FUSE grant and an INBRE fellowship to garner further research experience.
Lavanya’s career interests include bioinformatics, with a focus on bioengineering, pathology, infectious diseases, public health, and analysis of big data sets. Her future goal is to earn a graduate degree in the biomedical field.
Additional Information
Bio
Lavanya is from Omaha, NE, and is studying bioinformatics, biology, and computer science, chemistry, and medical humanities.
Her non-profit experience includes partnering with Open Door Mission. As a community action project, her team deployed a web application that aims to increase retention rates in facility social service programs by better connecting homeless individuals with employees of the shelter and their schedules. Homeless individuals must often depend on public transportation, which may not be timely or may be difficult to manage in addition to childcare or other stressors of homelessness, in turn causing them to miss important appointments. These appointments, scheduled in assistance with the Open Door Mission, help clients rise out of poverty, and bridge the roughly $20,000 gap between self-sustainability and dependence on government aid.
An appointment display board that better connects individuals to their schedules may help mitigate this issue. Accordingly, through this project, they aimed to help clients of the sheltered bridge the income gap, which in turn will reduce rates of relapse into homelessness in the Omaha metro area. They eventually hope to make this application more widely available and implement the software statewide through a partnership with MACCH (the Metro Area Continuum of Care). Her leadership experience includes serving as a representative and president of the Honors Student Association at UNO. In this role, she works with faculty to plan and execute events that promote a sense of community in the honors program.
She has also volunteered at campus events that showcase the importance of sustainable practices. Her internship experience includes volunteering at the University of Nebraska Medical Center to gain insight into the medical field. In this role, she trained volunteers, ensured patient comfort, and completed general administrative tasks for doctors and nurses. She has also previously worked as a research assistant in the Computer Science Lab at UNO, where she trained artificial intelligence to detect digital information such as terrorist images on websites or Tweets related to cancer.
This summer 2021, she will work for the NIH INBRE Fellowship, facilitated by Dr. Tapprich at UNMC. In this role, she will be researching to help characterize a novel podovirus, UNO-SLW2, using bioinformatics methodologies. She will also participate in lecture and speaker series to learn more about different fields of biomedical research, and present her research at a conference at the end of the summer. This internship is part of a 2-year program and will continue during the academic year.
Her research experience includes working in the Bioinformatics Lab at the UNO, under the guidance of Dr. Kathryn Cooper. She is currently working on using bioinformatics algorithms to analyze frameshift mutations of critical nucleotides in different viruses, which are then used to identify genomic sources of pathogenicity in different strains of the virus. She has received the FUSE grant and an INBRE fellowship to garner further research experience.
Lavanya’s career interests include bioinformatics, with a focus on bioengineering, pathology, infectious diseases, public health, and analysis of big data sets. Her future goal is to earn a graduate degree in the biomedical field.