Hebron Bekele

Undergraduate Fellow
Team Vibes

How did you get here? What brought you to Tyson?

I heard about Tyson through my principal investigator, who I had already been working with for a year. We were studying insect vibrations and signals and stuff. She had already been working on a project with Kim Medley, the director of Tyson. She asked me if I wanted to join the project this summer, and I agreed. It was kind of an extension of what I had already been doing.

Hebron is a computer science major, and I was curious how she got into biology-focused research.

Yeah, well I actually used to be a biology major. I’m on the pre-med track, so I’ve taken a lot of bio courses and stuff like that. That’s how I knew about Dr. Fowler-Finn. I heard she was looking for people to work on her bio research, so I reached out and asked if she needed anything computer-related. She was like, actually, I’m working with one of your computer science professors on a machine learning project! So it was a perfect mix.

I feel like a lot of people would be surprised with how interdisciplinary our project is. There’s people from so many different fields – math, biology, environmental science. It’s all over the place.

How might this work inform what you want to do down the road?

I’m really interested in machine learning and neuroscience. I’m hoping to pursue an MD/PhD where I could utilize all this machine learning stuff, but more in the context of neuroscience.

What do you do in your free time? For fun?

I really like to run. I’m training for my second half marathon. I like reading as well, especially the author Khaled Hosseini. He wrote The Kite Runner and a few other books, and now I’m reading A Thousand Splendid Suns.