Sahana's Project Page

Who:  As a local Utahn, I was excited to attend the University of Utah and represent the college that inspired and sparked my passion for science. While being part of the ACCESS program, this passion has only grown and the program has facilitated my growth and development both as a person and scientist. In addition to my love of science, I am also an Indian Classical Dancer and enjoy spending my weekends performing and teaching.

My scientific/engineering interests:  While math is about simplicity in the complex and art is about the complexity in the simple, the notion that math and art are opposites is very wrong. As a dancer and science enthusiasts, I’d always believed in order to succeed in one, I’d have to forsake the other. Through further exploration of the fields, I realize that the different parts of my life work in harmony and each strengthens the other.

Academic goals:  As a mathematics and computer engineering double major, I look forward to combining the power of computing with the principles of mathematics. I want to continue working in my ACCESS lab and continue to infuse STEM research with ethical dilemmas and social issues. I hope to further continue my research and earn a PhD in mathematics to quench my curiosity and work in industry to apply my knowledge in practical scenarios.

Career goals:  I hope to work in the field of artificial intelligence and data science. I look forward to coding machine learning algorithms and using data to identify trends and solve problems. I am excited to use my skills as a mathematician and apply it to real life data structures. I also hope to be involved in outreach and support other women in STEM programs like ACCESS to motivate girls to break the stereotype and pursue science.

In 2019, the American justice system holds almost 2.3 million people between state prisons, federal prisons, correctional facilities and local jails. As this number increases, staff become overworked and prisoner rights are often overlooked. One of these overlooked rights is that prisoners cannot be held in a county jail indefinitely without a conviction. Sadly, many inmates are unaware of this law and don’t have the resources to know when they can be released. As inmates are held in custody, their lives are disrupted; many lose their jobs, are forced to take unpaid leave, or lose custody of their children. The Habeas Project (initiated by the ACLU of Utah)  hoped to reform this injustice by using the publicly available information on county jail websites together with detailed records from court hearings to determine whether and how defendant rights are being violated. The data collected could also have potential to identify faults in the justice system and can track the rate of reform, average time out of jail and escalation of crimes. As part of this project, we needed to build tools to extract relevant jail records from all the different counties in Utah. Since each county records and stores data in different ways, this has to be done on a per-county basis. My work was to build a web scraper for Salt Lake County and collect all relevant information from the site.  By running this program daily, we can track how long inmates are held and in conjunction with the ACLU, work on getting them representation and eventually freedom.

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