About Me

My name is Ivan Chizurum Ezeigbo. I am from Abia State, Nigeria, and I am an undergraduate student taking a Natural Science and Computational Science double major at Minerva Schools at KGI (Keck Graduate Institute), San Francisco, California, USA. I have an ardent passion for investigating the bridge between biology/medicine and economic markets, using computational models. I am currently a junior at Minerva, and I am interested in Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning, and Virtual Reality (VR), and how its applications and benefits can be channeled to other sciences. I initially started programming as a hobby. I am curious to see how computational science can be integrated into the sciences and economics in bringing about breakthroughs in economics, science and medicine which has guided me to undertaking various personal projects.

About Me

One of these personal projects is my work on biological networks where I designed an agent-based model using Python to understand how diversity, costly punishment and connectivity influence cooperation. My paper on this project would soon be published and available online for readers. I have also done some statistics work with R where I designed an algorithm for preidicting counterfactuals, without employing the matching algorithms, given that the counterfactuals fall within the convex hull which is determined using Gower's Distance. During the summer of 2017, I did biomedical research under the Summer Undergraduate Research Internship Program (SURIP) at Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine, Hershey, Pennsylvania, USA. I researched on the effect of enhanced REDD1 (Regulated in Development and DNA Damage response 1) expression due to diabetes-induced hyperglycemia on liver autophagy. A similar study has been carried out by my research supervisor and principal investigator on the effects of enhanced REDD1 expression, due to diabetes-induced hyperglycemia, on retinopathy. Essentially, I identify autophagy markers in hepatocytes due to diabetes-induced hyperglycemia, comparing proteins that are expressed (with special interest to REDD1) on wild type mice against REDD1 knockout mice. This is a study that has the primary objective of preventing blindness and liver autophagy among diabetic patients. I went on afterwards to design a web application for a research team at the LCD (Language and Cognitive Development) Lab in University of California, Berkeley, California, USA which was used to conduct an experiment on children in testing their cognitive associations.

Minerva Schools at KGI (a member of the Claremont College Consortium) is an accredited four-year liberal arts college that provides a re-imagined educational experience for the brightest, most talented and motivated students from all over the world. Classes are taken on an online active learning platform. It was founded in 2012 by former Snapfish president, Ben Nelson, and its founding Dean is Stephen Kosslyn, who has served as dean in Stanford and Harvard. It has a stunning 1.9% acceptance rate (making it “the most selective undergraduate program in U.S. history”) and emphasizes critical thinking, problem solving, active learning, and global/cultural immersion. Hence, students rotate and spend their undergraduate years in seven different countries for the entire four years. Further detail can be found here.

Website of the school: https://www.minerva.kgi.edu


Primary Email Address: ivyezeigbo@yahoo.com School Email Address: ivan@minerva.kgi.edu