Media Advisory: High schoolers to get crash course in computational science

BUFFALO, N.Y. – Wearable health sensors. High-performance computing. Diabetes care.

Those are just a few of the topics that high schoolers will cover this week at the Eric Pitman Annual Summer Workshop in Computational Science.

The workshop, hosted annually by the University at Buffalo since 1999, is led by the UB Center for Computational Science (CCR).

“With the exception of COVID years, we’ve been running this workshop continuously for nearly 30 years. During that time, we’ve introduced hundreds of incredibly talented students from all over Western New York to what it’s like to work in cutting-edge scientific fields,” says the workshop’s director E. Bruce Pitman.

This year, students will work with Lucy Mastrandrea, MD, PhD, professor of pediatrics in the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at UB.

Their project, centered on improving diabetes care, involves creating virtual models of individual patients that can learn from wearable health sensors and help guide real-time insulin delivery. Students will receive hands-on experience in computational medicine, including exposure to high-performance computing, and other digital health technologies.

The workshop is open to members of the news media.

What: The Eric Pitman Annual Summer Workshop in Computational Science.

Who: 14 students from a dozen high schools in Western New York.

When: June 29 to July 2.

Where: UB CCR at 701 Ellicott St., Buffalo, and other locations on the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus.

Note to media: The best time to cover the workshop is at 2 p.m. on Thursday, July 2, when student teams will present their final projects.

Background: CCR leadership has organized a workshop in computational science for high school students annually since 1999.

In 2007, CCR renamed the workshop the Eric Pitman Annual Summer Workshop on Computational Science in honor of Eric Pitman, who was a freshman at St. Joseph’s Collegiate Institute when he passed away in 2007 after a brief illness. A Science Olympiad participant at St. Gregory the Great Elementary School, Eric was an avid reader, a young man who enjoyed learning new things and challenging his thinking about the world and his place within it.

Leadership: E. Bruce Pitman, PhD, professor in the UB Department of Materials Design and Innovation, and Eric Pitman’s father. In addition to Pitman and Mastrandrea, workshop leaders include:

• Danial Faghihi, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.
• Tarun Singh, PhD, professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.
• Sandra Small, PhD, senior manager of science education and workforce development at UB’s Office of Business and Entrepreneur Partnerships, and education coordinator at UB’s Genome, Environment, and Microbiome Community of Excellence.
• Matthew Jones, PhD, CCR director and lead computational scientist.
• Nikolay Simakov, PhD, CCR computational scientist.
• Anton Nekhai, CCR research computing and data science facilitator.
• Adrian Levesque, CCR assistant director for industrial projects and visualization services.
• Wandana Samaan, MD, pediatric endocrinology fellow at the Jacobs School.
• Hend Abd El Baky, MBBS, pediatric endocrinology fellow at the Jacobs School.