From Faculty Mentorship to Impactful Undergraduate Research

As an R1 Research University, Lehigh gives students the chance to engage in groundbreaking research from day one. Under the mentorship of Professor Thomas McAndrew in his Computational Uncertainty Lab, College of Health (COH) undergraduates Cheyenne Desmond ’28 and Aaron Colon ’27 are exploring how infectious diseases spread in large groups. Their research has been especially timely and impactful during this season of heightened focus on infectious disease, and the students are contributing to a manuscript as co-authors.

Undergraduate researchers receive training in core research methods, including data collection and analysis. With guidance from the faculty research team, students also develop project management skills and gain hands-on experience contributing to the study’s goals, which includes co-authorship on publications.

We spoke to Desmond and Colon to learn more about this research, their experiences as undergraduate student researchers and why they chose to attend the COH.

What is the focus of your research, and what impact does it have?

Cheyenne Desmond: People form groups all the time. Common examples are schools with students moving around classrooms throughout the day, nursing homes where residents come together for events or food, and conferences where attendees go to different events that they’re interested in. Through all of these, people are going into different rooms, where they can be grouped together and then going into new rooms/groups.

Our research takes this idea of people constantly moving and forming different groups through time (called temporal networks) and applies it to healthcare. Through the past few years, we’ve seen the disastrous impact that infectious diseases have on the world. Their growth is accelerated by superspreader events, where people gather en masse for a period of time before going back to their smaller groups. There are models that work to predict pathogen spread and outbreaks, but there’s not many that take into account the movement of groups in temporal networks. This leads to our hypothesis, that if we’re given a temporal network, where all we know is what room someone plans to be in/is in over time, we can then predict the spread of a pathogen throughout the network and identify potential outbreaks.

Aaron Colon: Using empirical data graciously given to us from the North American Victorian Studies Conference, we were able to build a temporal network of attendees' movement across 30 sessions, finding that contact density and the largest connected group strongly predict outbreak risk, especially during super spreader events. Throughout our simulations, we also found that interventions like masking and splitting groups into smaller ones during these high-risk moments can significantly reduce infection.

The impact of this work is that it helps us move toward practical tools to predict and prevent outbreaks in real-time. Although we began with conference data, the same approach can be applied to schools, workplaces and any other congregate settings to keep communities safer with targeted interventions. 

What has your experience been like as a student researcher at the COH? 

AC: I've worked as a research assistant on a separate project the summer before; however, my experience with Professor McAndrew is the first one I've worked on in the COH. What I’ve really noticed is how different the environment feels here compared to other research experiences. The COH is still a relatively new college, which makes it exciting because there’s so much energy around building something innovative. Faculty and students are all working toward a common goal of shaping the future of health through data, research and community impact.

I think as a student and new researcher, I really enjoyed and preferred my opportunity to work with McAndrew. I feel like he's constantly on the project, and if I don't have the answer or need support, he's there to guide me and give his opinion. But at the same time, I feel like I'm always encouraged to think critically and contribute my ideas. I think that the conjunction between independence and support, along with the COH's focus on novel approaches, makes my experience feel unique and sets it apart from other colleges. 

CD: Being an undergraduate co-author in the COH is extremely engaging. With Professor McAndrew, I’ve had the opportunity to learn while doing research in an environment where I feel supported. Everything is extremely hands-on, and it feels like we’re all working together to understand and make new discoveries and lengths that we’re all enthusiastic about. I feel proud of my research and all of the new knowledge I’ve gained, and I’m surrounded by so many supportive people—not only a part of the lab I’m in, but in the COH as a whole—who are always open to help me and provide me with a bunch of new ideas to think about after every conversation. All of these things I feel set the COH apart from other colleges and universities.

Why did you choose to attend the COH?

CD: I chose to attend the COH to have the ability to grow with the college and my major. In high school I knew I wanted to go into health, but didn’t really know where to start. Lehigh’s College of Health was intriguing, as it was so new and had only just graduated its first cohort. Meeting and speaking with the students showed how much the school was doing in only its first years. Everyone talked about the college with passion and love, which is what convinced me. As biostatistics was first introduced last year, my freshman year, it too was the students, faculty and staff who really showed their passion and dedication that convinced me to join the major. Everyone here in the COH—be it biostat, HMS (health, medicine and society), community and global health, population health or any of the minors—all show a genuine appreciation to what they teach and learn, even though the college is still growing, which is why I decided to come here.

AC: My reasoning for attending the COH is not one in the traditional sense. At first, I meant to be a biology major due to my pre-med aspirations, but somehow I enrolled myself in the College of Health. I was told I had to wait until sophomore year to transfer to my college, and was intending to do so until I heard that Lehigh's College of Health was creating a biostatistics program. I dug deeper and found more about it, and it really touched upon a lot of interests. I felt it was a good intersection between data/statistics, coding and health. 

As I learned more, I came to a realization about how unique the College of Health is in its mission; it's not solely medicine or using numbers, but about connecting what we learn to real-world issues and communities. Each major in the COH has a unique set of skills, all of which are distinguished from one another. I really admired the different amount of skills and public health applications that are constantly resonating through the lectures and being added to improve. I think what also drew me in was the environment here. The COH really promotes interdisciplinary learning, so I'm constantly exposed to different perspectives, whether it's data science, epidemiology or behavioral health. I think that diversity of thought pushed me in ways I never expected, and as I write this is down, in the end, I'm really glad I accidentally landed in the COH, since it's given me the chance to find a new passion and a path I'm actually passionate about.