Sarah Higbee Email & Phone Number

Baltimore, Maryland, United States

This was an exciting opportunity to assist with cutting-edge research into machine learning for predicting patient outcomes and life saving interventions. Given the huge volume of sensor data being processed, my job was to improve their code, set up a more efficient system for running it, and other programming tasks as required in this fast-moving environment. I mainly used python (with some matlab and javascript) on Windows and Linux, interfacing with redis, mongoDB, and a network of worker nodes. The faculty were fascinating to work with, and their sensor system was even able to help with covid treatment in the University of Maryland Medical Center.

Johnstown, Pennsylvania Area

I was part of an agile team, developing a web application for one of Problem Solutions' clients. We used C# .Net, Vue.js, and SQL Server to build a flexible and robust MVC application. As a team, we supported and learned from each other, adapting to changing client needs while always moving forward.

Greater Pittsburgh Area

Health providers want to rate their performance on hundreds of health quality measures. We're writing and testing the logic that takes in patient records and outputs those performance rates. Owing to the tight-knit, cooperative team I'd joined- the Measuredev team- and their great scrum master Jamie Craig, I'm inclined to say "We" instead of "I" when talking about my work.We've developed measures for use through Premier's Gateway webapp. We've built a parser for EHRs (Electronic Health Records) from the ground up, using QRDA (Quality Reporting Document Architecture) specifications.In the latter part of this year (2018) we've been transitioning to a new measure calculation engine, and my main duty has been to convert measures from our existing library into CQL (Clinical Quality Language) for use in the new engine. Adapting to CQL was considered one of the biggest challenges of the transition, and it's been a heavy workload even when other tasks were slack, but we've consistently met our sprint goals ahead of schedule.As certification deadlines came and went, Measuredev was called in for the crucial testing, debugging, and sample data creation. As I write this, the certification results haven't come in yet, but I've got all the faith in the world in us!

Canonsburg, Pa

I worked at ANSYS through the University of Pittsburgh's co-op program, which lets undergraduates alternate between full-time study and full-time internship. I stayed at ANSYS for two rotations, hence the two listings.I worked on UI development under an individual supervisor. I was given a lot of freedom to explore ANSYS's code base, and at various points I extended the UI toolkit, ran unit tests, and debugged. I was struck by how much time my fellow co-op students and I lost to mistakes in environment setup, so I made a point of working on documentation and automation for that. Hopefully it's come in handy for the co-ops who followed.

Pittsburgh, Pa

For a summer, I worked with Drs. Markus Dittrich and Stephen D. Meriney at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. I ran Monte Carlo simulations of calcium in a frog's neuromuscular junction, varying the number and position of calcium channels and logging the pulse ratio when the synapse fired. The simulations were meant to supplement experiments on live frogs. The goal was to find the relationship between the physical structure of a synapse, and how it changes its behavior after repeat firings.The results are too complex to sum up here, so if you want to know more I suggest checking out the papers the aforementioned Ph.Ds have published. As for me, I made a graded presentation at the end of the summer semester and considered it a valuable learning experience.