Graduate School Application Essay

Five years ago, my brother was diagnosed with a rare form of Leukemia. I could do nothing to help. It hurt to know that his condition was out of my hands. That helplessness turned into a strong motivation to make a difference in the medical community, and help people like my brother. I self-studied everything I could about my brother’s disease and discovered an electrical engineering research paper that used data of the cytology of Leukemia cells in machine learning to predict the disease prognosis. Using machine learning as a tool to make an advancement that could affect numerous lives piqued my interest. The combination of seeing my brother’s struggle and my sudden interest in machine learning sparked a passion that started to drive me into

MIT’s Institute of Medical Engineering and Science various research areas particularly piques my interest. The various approaches that professors use at IMES to fight illnesses will allow me to gain a well-rounded vision of how we as engineers can utilize techniques which seem unrelated to medicine to make a real difference. The deep connection that MIT has with its neighboring hospitals is the biggest reason why I am attracted to it. Professor David Sontag’s involvement with IMES as well as his clinical connections to the nearby hospitals excites me. In particular, I noticed that my current research as well as my future research interests goes hand in hand with his. From my brief research of his interests, I discovered that his lab is hoping to develop “novel approaches to modeling high-dimensional time-series data” using deep learning and “algorithms that use data to better understand disease progression and to facilitate precise treatment strategies for multiple myeloma” which matches my current research and my future research interests in oncology respectively. I’ve also read Professor Sontag’s paper on Unsupervised Learning of Disease Progression Models to gain insight on Markov Jump Processes and the EM algorithm used and see if any modifications could be made for my own research at The Cooper Union. Although I did not use the algorithm in the model, it provided me a clearer view of how the paper can be used in different contexts in the medical sciences. Although oncology is my primary interest, I am interested in some other research efforts that are happening at IMES. In fact, I was inspired by Professor John Gabrieli’s lab’s work on researching developmental and autism spectrum disorders by using EEGs in order to conduct my thesis research. I hope that MIT gives me the opportunity to strive for my dream and attempt to make these contributions to