Academic Projects
Academic Projects
The Relationship Between Plant-Based Diets and Mental Health: Exploring Links to Depression, Anxiety, and Cognitive Function
Abstract: This research examines associations between dietary patterns, demographics, and mental health outcomes using cross-sectional data from the 2021–2023 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. Simple ordinal logistic regression models and tests of group mean differences reveal an association between higher adherence to a plant-based diet and higher odds of reporting less severe depression, less frequent anxiety, and better cognitive function. Principal component analysis and more complex ordinal logistic regression models reveal that greater adherence to a plant-based diet, coupled with a lower intake of vitamin B12 and added B12, is linked to increased odds of experiencing more severe depression, suggesting that an inadequately supplemented plant-based diet may negatively impact mental well-being. Unexpectedly, higher intakes of B and E vitamins are also linked to worse mental health outcomes, suggesting possible reverse causality. Future studies should explore these mechanisms longitudinally to better understand causality, identify unmeasured confounders, and inform targeted interventions.
Recordings of Crows from Around the World: An API-powered app
This app pulls data from the public API, xeno-canto.org, on birds of Order: Passeriformes, Family: Corvidae (Crows, Jays), Genus: Corvus.
Predict the species of crow from which a bird recording originates, based on location (country) and season (fall, winter, spring, summer) of the recording. A random forest classifier was trained on metadata from the xeno-canto bird sound database. The app displays species predictions along with audio recordings, model performance metrics, and an interactive data table.
Note that the app may take up to a minute to fully load.
View My Web App View My GitHub Repo
Follow Your Gut: An evidence-based, plant-based health blog
Follow Your Gut is an evidence-based, plant-based health blog that presents recent, high-quality research in easy-to-digest summaries, with a focus on the impact of various diet interventions on mental and physical health outcomes. It serves as a resource for readers to learn how plant-based lifestyles benefit the body and mind.
Each weekly post highlights a new study that examines the effect of plant-based diet interventions on specific health indicators. The post discusses the study’s design, method, findings, and limitations using plain language, with a glossary of terms provided as necessary. Additionally, a list of related studies is provided for further reading. At the end of every post, there is also a link to a simple vegan recipe for readers to try on their own.
Exploring the Environmental Impact of Common Food Products: An interactive web app
This app contains two interactive data tables and charts for users to explore the environmental impacts of producing common foods. Users can sort, filter, add, or remove food products to update the data tables and charts. Hovering over the bars of data in the 2 charts reveals more detailed information. All data tables are downloadable for future research.
Analysis of the Avatar: The Last Airbender Dataset
An analysis of the Avatar: The Last Airbender dataset, including a regression model that accurately predicts IMDb rating of episodes based on a set of features including book, chapter, number of lines spoken by key characters, director, and/or first writer.
View My Project on Google Colab
Graduate School Admissions Data Science Portfolio
My data science portfolio, used for graduate school admissions.
View My Data Science Portfolio
