Eli Silvert Email & Phone Number

I aim to positively impact society by building tools that make it function more efficiently, sustainably, and fairly. Recently I've worked on healthcare data science problems (UPenn & nference) and on mitigating Boston’s overly-punitive car towing industry (towzonealerts.com). Prior, I forayed into clean energy (Tesla & senior thesis project), wetlab research for diabetes cell replacement therapy (WUSTL Amgen Scholar) and targeted antibiotic drug delivery mechanisms (Shukla Lab for Designer Biomaterials), and financial trading (DE Shaw Nexus Fellow). At UPenn, I work under Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel on a value-based care project funded by Schmidt Futures, where we're developing a novel algorithm that mitigates upcoding/selection and ensures accuracy and equity in Medicare capitated payments.Since moving to Boston in 2020, what’s kept me up at night is a fear that my car could be towed -- a surprisingly common and painful occurrence. The average car owner gets towed once per year here, primarily for street cleaning. So, I co-developed the SMS-based service “Tow Zone Alerts”. We 1) send automated reminders about relevant street parking rules and 2) facilitate peer-to-peer alerts via license plate reporting. We started in April 2023, and as of April 2024 calculate from Boston's towing logs that our service has reduced the rate of towing by over 80% for subscribers. The service has been featured in the Boston Globe, Boston Globe Today, Boston Bulletin, Channel 7 News, and WBUR and WBZ radio.