Senior Project

My senior capstone project was a research paper on vaccine distrust. My project was the culmination of a fairly diverse class schedule and experience set. It required a lot of my statistical and data knowledge from experiences like STAT 272, STAT 316, MSCS 341, CIR, and CURI. It also required a deep understanding of the social mechanics of vaccinations that I was able to think about in experiences like BIO 231, SOAN 267, ID 280, PHIL 250, and FAMST 232. My project also helped me think about my core guiding questions — how culture has impacted vaccination policies, how statistics can be used to inform public health efforts, and data/technology options for investigating public health campaigns.

I spent fall semester doing background research on vaccine hesitancy & the history of anti-vaccination sentiment. Much of what I read can be found in my annotated bibliography. I also had the opportunity to speak with and learn from Kristen Ehresmann, the director of Infectious Disease Epidemiology, Prevention, and Control Division at the Minnesota Department of Health. She provided incredibly valuable insight for my project and I can’t thank her enough!

I have spent much of spring semester doing the data science portion of my research project. I obtained a data set on child vaccination rates (the CDC’s 2018 National Immunization Survey, available here) and have been creating a model to learn which factors are associated a child not being up to date on their shots.

Below are links to my presentation and final paper. The presentation gives an overview of my major and a glimpse of my project. The paper is the culmination of my research efforts and includes the findings from my research in fall as well as my modeling results from spring.