Cognitive and Information Sciences (CIS) Ph.D. student Ben Nguyen spent last summer working as a data analyst at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Nguyen was selected for the competitive fellowship through the nonprofit organization Coding it Forward, which brings early career technologists from across the country to work on high-impact projects in local, state and federal government offices through its Civic Digital Fellowship and Civic Innovation Corps programs.
His internship through the Civic Digital Fellowship program was with the NIH’s All of Us research program — an effort to gather diverse genomic data hosted on a platform called Researcher Workbench. Nguyen was tasked with understanding who workbench users were and how they engaged with the platform. Additionally, he connected workbench users to NIH grant funding information to further assess whether the program was achieving its goal of making data more accessible to early career researchers.
“The most valuable thing I learned from this internship was the experience of working in government, as well as gaining confidence in the employability of the skills I am gaining here at UC Merced,” Nguyen said.
Read more: https://ucm.edu/pHqeTo
