Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Student (Summer 2021)

"During the summer of 2021, I was honored to have been given the opportunity to be a part of the Injury Science REU program at CIRP. Under the guidance of my mentor, Thomas Seacrist, MBE, the main project I worked on came from a national survey about having Active Safety Technology (AST) in vehicles to help reduce crashes.

I ran the data through R and ran statistical tests to analyze the differences in opinions between teen drivers and parents of teen drivers on crash avoidance features by their demographics, including gender, education, and crash history. A second project I started during my internship came from a Naturalistic Driving Study using the SHRP2 data. Through R, I was able to separate the data based on whether the driver has kids 8 years or younger in their household or not. This will make it easier to look for driving patterns in situations where their is a child in the car or not. 

From this experience, I have learned about injury science research and its importance in today’s world. I am glad I was able to apply the knowledge and skills I learned from inside the classroom to a real-world problem where the results are not always going to be what we want them to be. I now understand how it takes multiple research teams to develop a solution and that it doesn’t all happen overnight.

I am now an undergraduate senior at Elizabethtown College completing my degree in Mathematics with a minor in Data Analytics. I look forward to going to graduate school in the data science field and to continue exploring what I can do to make a change in the world. I thoroughly enjoyed every part of the program from the seminars to the staff and working with the other REU students. If I had to do it all again, I would choose the Injury Science REU every time."