SDSC undergraduate student led a research to address public health challenges

The School of Data Science (SDSC) is dedicated to nurturing a research culture, not only for graduate students but also our undergraduate students. Miss Keyang Ni, Year-4 BSDS student, is one of the leading authors of a paper entitled “Model-informed targeted network interventions among MSM social networks in Zhuhai, China” which was recently published in IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems.

Led by Dr. Qingpeng Zhang of SDSC, this study is a collective effort with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA and Zhuhai Center for Diseases Control and Prevention, Zhuhai, China. The team saw the urgent need for effective HIV prevention interventions among Men Who Have Sex with Men (MSM), thus devising such research. They proposed a new method, RiskRank, to prioritize individuals in MSM social networks for interventions. Results show that the targeted interventions are effective in large-scale HIV epidemic control.

More and more of our undergraduate students are participating in research endeavor, with their work published. It demonstrates their aptitude for research at the apprentice level, as in top-notch research universities.

Full paper: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9940227.