Sirihaasa N.

Sirihaasa Nallamothu is a freshman studying computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. She is currently the lead researcher on an Institutional Review Board approved study at Illinois State University, where she is collecting physiological data on POTS (Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome) patients to predict vasovagal syncope (spontaneous chronic fainting) in advance using machine learning algorithms. The goal of her human subjects study is to identify relevant features in a 15-minute time window by analyzing heart rate, blood pressure, and other signals and apply ML techniques. She has won multiple research grants, including one from a venture capital firm, and has worked with national POTS support groups and research labs to support her study. In 2021, she presented her research, “Supervised Binary Convolutional Neural Networks for “Supervised Binary Convolutional Neural Networks with Model Stacking for Diagnosis of Fundus & Eyelid Diseases,” at MIT Undergraduate Research Technology conference and won the Illinois BioGENEius competition. She was a machine learning researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign at ACTION lab in 2021, and was a ML intern at Alectio, a DataPrepOps startup where she built sample models for clients and researched synthetic data. She started “The Dream Code Project,” in partnership with Girl Scouts of Central Illinois where she demystifies computer science to middle school girls and teaches HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Machine Learning. Sirihaasa’s goal is to use computer science to create technology that advocates for overlooked and underfunded chronic illnesses: particularly those that plague women.