About
Like many of us, COVID-induced lockdowns sent Louie Belile (CDS’26) in search of new ways to pass the time and to keep his mind sharp. Belile, who was studying at Boston Latin School at the time and is now a BU first-year, found his appetite for research.“I feel like it mainly came from quarantine,” he says. “As COVID happened, I was kind of stuck at home, not doing much. My school sort of pulled back when it came to workload, so I was like, ‘I need something to do.’”
That was his first year taking computer science, and his teacher was open to new ideas and people recommending new lessons. “So I told him I want to learn about artificial intelligence, and I kind of branched off from that.”
At the recommendation of his teacher, Belile took part in a summer program with the MIT Beaver Works Institute, and the spark of his interest in data science and computer science took off.
“The program dealt with self-driving cars,” he says. “I remember the first week, we disassembled one of those Roombas, and we used the parts to make a car, a little toy car.” And we kind of used that to start off our coding and how we wanted to use that to get it to move around. And I feel like that introduced me to a lot of the powers of Python and how it connects with data science.”
Belile was a track star, and appropriately, his data science excitement was also off and running as he neared graduation. He delved into another school project topic that was pertinent to his and the rest of the world’s situation: COVID restrictions. Belile’s studies led him to learn that “all of the mandates and things happening weren’t based off data sometimes.” That new project excited Belile enough that he could see himself continuing to apply data science to public health.