Student Spotlight - Sarah Weingarten

As an undergraduate at Brown University, Sarah Weingarten concentrated her studies on biochemistry, and her independent research project focused specifically on plant biochemistry. While she found that she loved the problem solving aspects of this hard science, she never really saw how her research could directly benefit society and, ultimately, help people. A woman of diverse talents, Sarah has also worked as an EMT, lifeguard, and CPR instructor. Public health, she found, is that umbrella that allows her to pull all of her interests together, and through her studies at Yale she has discovered a brand new passion: data analysis.

This summer, Sarah is interning with the New Haven Health Department, where she is swimming in data in the form of mandatory reports for cases of sexually transmitted infections from both physicians and labs. Despite the era of electronic records, these reports are still being transmitted via paper. Using the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s free Epi Info software, Sarah is creating a database and data entry system that will allow the department to easily process, analyze, and act on the information that is being collected on gonorrhea and chlamydia. Sarah plans to continue her work into the academic year and write her thesis for the Department of Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases with the findings from this new system.