UW encourages its faculty and students to “be a world of good.” Saloni Parikh – a double-major in CSE and Public Health – has heeded that call in her work on the HOPE (Home-based Partner Education and Testing) project, using UW CSE’s Open Data Kit to improve HIV screening and data collection in Africa.
UW published a nice feature story today on Saloni’s research, tracing her journey from the late professor Gaetano Borriello’s lab in Seattle to a poverty-stricken city in Kenya.
Saloni was instrumental in improving data collection by nurses and community health workers conducting HIV testing and counseling of pregnant women and their partners in Kisumu, Kenya’s third-largest city. Saloni programmed mobile devices to enable the collection of patient data and spent the summer of 2013 in the city of Kisumu training providers how to use them in the field. She remains involved with the HOPE project – as well as other global health projects at UW – to this day.
Read the full article here.
Check out the UW School of Public Health’s profile of Saloni here.