Biomedical Research and Mentorship Program
Continuing as a full-stack developer on HIRConnect under Dr. Danny Wu — taking ownership of front-end and back-end development, co-authoring a research paper, and learning hard lessons about production testing.
After a great spring semester with RaMP, I stayed on at the ICDCU bioinformatics lab over the summer under my supervisor, Dr. Danny Wu. That spring had been my introduction to biomedical informatics, where my interest in technology and my interest in healthcare finally overlapped, and I wanted to keep going.
I continued as a developer and student researcher, focused mostly on HIRConnect, the system that helps professionals at Cincinnati Children's Hospital (CCHMC) manage their research projects.
I started by getting to know the databases behind the system, then co-authored a research paper on user-centered design and best practices for building applications meant for a wide audience. Over time I took on more of the usability fixes and bug work. Dr. Wu and my team leader, Shubhra Gupta, taught me a lot about software development and why readable, user-friendly code matters, and I put that to work fixing issues and improving the system.
When my team leader stepped away for a while, I took over as a full-stack developer, handling both the front-end and the back-end (database management and data processing) of HIRConnect. It was a heavy stretch of development that produced several of the pages we used in usability testing. Working with the design team, I fixed bugs, cleaned up usability problems, and built out features to match how the hospital actually worked. The regular meetings with people from Cincinnati Children's gave me real respect for how much effort goes into building software for users who aren't technical.
My programming got noticeably faster over those months. Tasks that used to take days started taking hours. And the whole thing drove home one idea: no matter how complex the software is underneath, it still has to be usable for everyone who touches it.
I learned that the hard way when a change I pushed broke a live usability testing session with healthcare professionals from CCHMC. It was a rough moment, but it taught me to test thoroughly before shipping anything — a habit I've carried into everything since, software or otherwise.
By the end of the summer, the continuation had done more than sharpen my computer science skills. It made me more disciplined and a lot more confident in my own work. I planned to keep contributing to the lab as a student worker, and I was genuinely looking forward to what came next.
