About Me
My name is Nina van Hoorn, and I am currently pursuing a Computer Science degree at Skidmore College. Alongside my major, I intend to minor in mathematics and receive an honors minor when I graduate in Spring 2025. I am broadly interested in how computer science, specifically machine learning, can be integrated with various other fields of study to help solve important problems; going forward, I would love to use machine learning models to help address issues like the climate crisis or global access to affordable healthcare. You can contact me by email at nvhoorn@gmail.com.
About My Mentor
This summer, I will be conducting research in the lab of Dr. Orit Peleg, a professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Colorado Boulder. Broadly, Dr. Peleg is currently studying how organisms (mainly fireflies and honeybees) communicate, but you can learn more about Dr. Peleg or her research by visiting her website at https://www.colorado.edu/biofrontiers/orit-peleg.
I’m also working more directly under Danielle Chase, a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Peleg’s lab focused on studying honeybee swarms. She is the person who I will be meeting with regularly and who will help me throughout the summer with conducting my own research.
About My Project
Honeybee swarms are large aggregations of honeybees formed by bees holding onto each other and are most often found in nature hanging from tree branches. Previous research on the swarms has found that they adapt efficiently to changes in their surrounding environment, raising the question of how each individual bee contributes to these changes in the swarm structure as a whole. Due to the dense, opaque nature of the swarms, it has not been possible to study how each bee behaves within the swarm, and research has been limited to observing the swarm as a whole from the outside or devising methods of estimating the location of bees within. To try to combat this limitation, I worked with Danielle Chase to develop a neural network capable of segmenting bees in three-dimensional X-ray images of the swarms. This network could fundamentally change the possibilities and scope of research regarding dense aggregations of multicellular organisms, starting with honeybee swarms.
For a summary of the research I conducted this summer, you can read my final report.
My Blog
To read about the research I completed on a weekly basis, visit my blog.