CFD Team Spotlight: Rana Hussein, Research Associate
The Newsletter Team sat down for an interview with our research associate, Rana Hussein, for an interview about her work, passions, hobbies, and special CFD projects. The transcript of our interview is below.
CFD Team: Tell us a bit about yourself.
I’ve moved around a lot – from New Jersey to Florida to Egypt then back to New Jersey, where I spent most of my life, until settling in Burlington, Massachusetts, where I live now.
CFD Team: What is your role within the Center, and what experiences most directly led you to your role with the Center?
I’m currently a research associate at the center. When I began my freshman year at BU, I had no idea what field I wanted to pursue, and my schedule – a disjoint collection of courses in completely separate disciplines, from creative writing to international relations to computer science – reflected this. I enjoyed them all for different reasons and found myself caught between so many disciplines that interested me. I spoke about my dilemma to just about anyone who would listen, many of whom told me I’d just have to accept that I couldn’t do everything; even if I decided to somehow integrate my interests, eventually, I could only choose one career. Every time I weighed my decision over in my head though, I couldn’t bring myself to accept the idea of focusing on one while completely neglecting the other.
When I was a sophomore, I found out about one of the interdisciplinary programs on forced displacement run by what was then the Initiative on Forced Displacement at BU in collaboration with the American University of Beirut and was excited about the opportunity to bridge the gap between what was then only a personal interest and my academic work. Among my favorite parts of the program were the informal conversations we had at the end of each day – either with our group over dinner or with the other students I got to know through the program – where we got to reflect on the ethical complexities of our engagement and I came to realize where my initial thinking about these issues lacked nuance.
In getting to work with an interdisciplinary team, the program also allowed me to understand not only how the fields of public health and computing could be integrated — which ended up forming the basis of my future research — but also that a field like computer science was much more than algorithms and code. And that it required constant, critical reflection of one’s work and its ethical implications. I realized the same questions of justice that intrigued me in my International Relations course were of relevance in my computer science work — questions of who has access to the state-of-the-art technologies we seek to develop, of which voices are heard and which are not in the process of designing our computational tools, of whether the computational models we develop operate on biased assumptions that would exacerbate societal inequities, and whether we consult the people we seek to serve when we design computational tools for their benefit. I ended up declaring a major in math and computer science because I liked the fact the field was so expansive and encompassing of my interests; I could delve into the math behind an algorithm while also considering broader questions about what it meant for this algorithm to be equitable.
Taking part in this program allowed me to realize what an integration of my interests might look like and has guided my thinking since. Shortly after returning, I made a plan to add several public health courses to my schedule each year – with an interest in pursuing work that made use of computational tools to assess the health of displaced and vulnerable communities, and during the program, I also got a chance to hear a bit more about Dr. Zaman’s research, reached out to discuss my interests and began working with him on a research project shortly after, where we worked in collaboration with UNICEF to assess child malnutrition rates in Yemen using different computational tools, which I continued working on for the rest of my time as an undergraduate. That next semester, I also took a course with Dr. Preston and Dr. Zaman called Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Global Challenges: The Global Crisis of Forced Displacement, which became one of my favorite courses. All of these experiences sparked by desire to engage with this issue in the long-term and an understanding of what this could look like, and I continued working with Dr. Zaman until I graduated and then began working at the Center shortly after graduating.
CFD Team: What inspires you about this work?
The opportunity to do work that will hopefully have a positive impact on people’s lives and, the connections I have been able to make, getting to work with and be surrounded by passionate and thoughtful people who are driven by a desire to do the same, and seeing the way that so many people, coming from completely disparate disciplines, are driven to engage with this issue. The opportunity to learn from people coming from such diverse disciplinary perspectives has taught me a lot and allowed me to broaden my thinking in many ways.
CFD Team: Tell us about some of your passions and hobbies outside of academia. What makes you you?
I love to write. I also love getting to be in nature – when I have the energy, going for early morning runs and getting to catch the sunrise is one of my favorite things to do.
CFD Team: What is your current passion project with the Center you would like to highlight? Why does this project resonate with you?
Last spring, we worked in collaboration with the Committee on Human Rights (CHR) of the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to host a workshop about STEM education and forced displacement. The workshop was motivated by the fact that STEM fields are often absent from conversations about teaching about forced displacement and when they do, they can often limit their thinking to a select few issues, like sanitation and hygiene, often do so using siloed approaches, and can sometimes contribute to fostering mindsets that engineering has all the answers to even the most complex challenges, always contributing solutions rather than potentially creating or exacerbating challenges. The workshop brought together experts in the fields of engineering, human rights, forced displacement, and pedagogy to develop a course that would prepare STEM students to help address challenges associated with forced displacement and by the end of the workshop, several participants had agreed their own versions of the course at their respective universities. Since then, we’ve worked with them to gather course materials and support with course planning. It’s been very exciting to see each of the courses take shape – all of which are courses I wished were available to me as an undergrad – and I’m excited to see them piloted and hopefully pave the way for students of all disciplinary backgrounds to engage with this issue in the long-term as well as start a broader conversation which allows standard STEM curricula to more broadly foster interdisciplinary thinking and empower students to grapple with complex issues like this one.