Peiyuan Sun (Biostatistics)

Career goal:

My career goal is to work for non-profit organizations like World Health Organization or Results for Development, focusing on environmental change and human health.

Internship outline:

My summer internship was in environmental-related research at the Maternal and Child Health Care Hospital in the Shunyi District in Beijing, China. My responsibilities and achievements included:

1. On-Site recruitment for voluntary pregnant patients to participate in the air pollution monitoring project. This project invited pregnant patients to wear watch like air monitor for 3 days before their ultrasound tests. Our project aimed to figure out air pollution’s effects on adverse pregnant women’s outcomes.
2. Cleaned data sets acquired from questionnaire survey and ultrasound test results with SAS software. Chinese-English bilingual variable dictionary was also established. More than one thousand variables were managed, which included patients’ characteristics variables, diet habits, and fetal growth parameters.
3. Acquired patients’ hard-copy medical records from hospital archives and recorded necessary variables into electronic excel files. More than 3,000 patients’ records were found and recorded into electronic files. Variables concentrate on mother patients’ BMI in different gestational weeks and new born baby’s basic parameters.

Value of experience:

This summer internship provided me a wonderful chance to apply the programming and statistics analysis skills that I learned to deal with real world public health related data. Additionally in this internship, I learned how to communicate professionally and effectively with patients. I realized how important it is for a biostatistician to communicate with people. Furthermore, this internship reinforced my team work abilities. I collaborated with hospital colleagues in all aspects to get work done. In summary, this internship prepared me well to deal with real-world public health issues and chase my future career goals as a biostatistician.

Best moment/experience:

I had an extremely pleasant time during my internship and I enjoyed every moment in the Maternal and Child Health Care Hospital. The best moment was when patients trusted me and agreed to participate in our air pollution monitoring project. We held recruitment activities in the class of pregnancy patients’ “pregnancy education” three times a week in the hospital. In the beginning, patients did not trust our team and were not willing to participate in our program. Under my supervisor’s lead, I learned how to communicate effectively with patients. Our team changed the recruitment slide show and recruitment strategy. Eventually, more and more patients trusted us and nodded their heads when we invited them to join the study.

Funding source:

Yale School of Public Health