Mridula S.

Mridula (Mally) Shan is a current junior at Harvard, pursuing a dual degree in Statistics and Human Developmental/Regenerative Biology, on the Computational Biology & Bioinformatics Track. Mally has been previously recognized as a High-School AiC award winner from 2018-2021 and was a 2021 National Honorable mention (aspirations.org/people/mridula-s/68388). Throughout her academic career, she has been interested in the intersection of technology and medicine, particularly as it relates to the protection of patient health records and the use of such EHRs alongside multiomics data for predicting disease progression/outcomes. She has received many accolades for her success in Cybersecurity, including the 2021 KnowBe4 Women in Cybersecurity scholarship and 2023 National Cyber Scholar with Honors award. Through the latter recognition, she received training from the NCSF-SANS Cyber Foundations Academy and successfully earned her GFACT (GIAC Foundational Cybersecurity technologies) certification. Additionally, her work on investigating the accessibility and impacts of cybersecurity programs on high-school girls’ long-term industry engagement was published in the Information and Computer Security journal. Such research stemmed from her experience as an AspireIT leader where she had the opportunity to work with the Department of Defense and Texas A&M - San Antonio to bring free Cybersecurity programming for girls in her city to learn more about the field. Likewise, her research on the real-time monitoring of health security attacks (mal-shan.shinyapps.io/healthsecurity/) was chosen by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) to be included in their 14th International Conference Proceedings on Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, and Health Informatics (BCB). She received a National Science Foundation student travel award to support her participation at the ACM-BCB conference. She would like to remain eager and enthusiastic about learning throughout her life.