#SoCaltech: Sina Booeshaghi
“Sometime in late July or early August, I started thinking, ‘Colleges are going to reopen soon. What's going to happen? Is there going to be testing? Is there not going to be testing?’ I knew there was a database created by The Chronicle of Higher Education that listed how universities were reopening, whether they were planning in-person or online teaching or some mix of the two, and I thought this database was pretty cool and I could build on it. So I started with that one and layered my own database on top of it with the testing plans for each university. I shared it with my adviser, Lior Pachter, and I shared it on Twitter, encouraging people to fill it out. We got to a point where we had 500 universities in the database with details of their testing plans and thousands of people viewing our document. It was a really awesome resource for administrators and also for epidemiologists to study the effects of COVID testing plans. We actually predicted the first post-reopening COVID outbreak at UNC a week before it happened. It was very much a community-driven effort. Scientists all across Twitter were helping out. Our group collaborated with another graduate student, Fayth Tan, here at Caltech; an undergraduate student at Middlebury College in Vermont; and a medical doctor at Johns Hopkins University who was my adviser’s former classmate at Caltech in undergrad. With this project and others I’ve initiated during the pandemic, I’ve learned more than I ever thought possible in this time period, and the skills I've gained will definitely be applicable to work I do in the future.”
Sina Booeshaghi is a mechanical engineering graduate student who has pivoted his research in recent months to several different facets of COVID-19, from analyzing college reopening plans to working on molecular biology technology to enable COVID-19 diagnostics.
#SoCaltech is an occasional series celebrating the diverse individuals who give Caltech its spirit of excellence, ambition, and ingenuity. Know someone we should profile? Send nominations to magazine@caltech.edu.