Ben Gardiner (CDS’25)
About
In the future, Ben Gardiner imagines his data science pursuits will most likely involve his interest in finance.But more recently, the BU sophomore was able to get real-world data science experience by applying a project from his linear algebra class to help Syneos Health, a biopharmaceutical company, become more efficient.
Gardiner (CDS’25) and his classmates were assigned to divide up various Reddit articles based on words in their content. He soon thought about other applications for this approach, and Twitter seemed like a natural place to look. So he developed a social media analytics tool to analyze healthcare providers, and he used a Twitter application programming interface, or an API, to gather healthcare providers’ social media data.
“I was able to cluster them into groups that had insights and value,” says Gardiner. “And so how Syneos wants to apply that is to use and collect the tweets from their healthcare providers and from doctors, and then to sort them.”
He says the company can sort the healthcare providers into groups and then they can focus on certain groups for certain areas—for example, a group of urologists versus a group of cardiologists.
“They can do that, and they can change their methods of outreach or their marketing methods based on various characteristics,” he explains. “It’s really rewarding, really exciting. And it’s cool that I was able to use the school project and use it to get an opportunity in the real world.”
Having proven his propensity for data science in the healthcare realm, Gardiner hopes to flex his interest in algorithmic trading and quantitative finance in the near future.“I think I’ve always been interested in the financial world and things like the stock market,” Gardiner says. “And there’s so much data there that it seems like the perfect place for me to blend in data science.”