Audrey Acken

Audrey is from the San Francisco bay area and graduated from The Nueva School. She loves puzzles and gets excited about all things data - analysis, visualization, digging for patterns to explain things. She plans to explore CS, Math, Biomedical Engineering, Neuroscience, and of course the Core at Columbia.

During her 9th grade summer, she was admitted into the AI4ALL program at Stanford, where she learned ML/AI fundamentals, toured research labs, and attended lectures on how AI is being applied to solve real-world problems in a myriad of ways. She was inspired by the human-centered approaches that drove all the interdisciplinary projects, and knew then she wanted to use her studies to find solutions to the very many challenges our generation faces. After the program, she worked on a project applying NLP methods as a framework to learn about the biases in the news coverage of the 2020 Democratic Presidential candidates. She later interned at the AI Lab for Bioinformatics at Brown University, where she worked to develop a search engine for genes in scientific literature using NLP. She plans to continue studying AI and exploring applications using AI during her time at Columbia.

She has also been actively volunteering for STEM education and hopes to continue in college. She's on the Women in Data Science (WiDS) education outreach team, developing curriculum and hosting datathon events for high school students. She tutored math and design thinking to middle school students, and also worked as a student coach for The Design Thinking Institute, where she collaborated with K-12 educators on how to apply Design Thinking in teaching.

In her free time, she loves drawing, reading, practicing Wushu, and learning ballroom dancing. She also loves food and caffeine :)