“I am profoundly grateful to the COVES Policy Fellowship, mentors, and colleagues who enriched this transformative journey. This experience ignited my passion for meaningful research.” 

Summer Responsibilities: To shed light on the lack of perinatal services available to rural Virginians and to encourage effective interventions, Zhenyi leveraged tools like ArcGIS, R, and Microsoft Access and discovered a significant correlation between longer travel times to health care providers and lower education levels with a higher likelihood of low birth-weight infants.

Background: Zhenyi focuses on developing advanced, data-driven algorithms for automated detection and extraction of global and local structures of protein landscape. He has worked as a graduate teaching assistant, providing tutoring and grading for introductory and advanced statistics courses, as well as a physics algorithm engineer in Beijing, China. In his free time, Zhenyi enjoys playing violin and was a member of the Great Woods Symphony Orchestra at Wheaton College.