Lauren Neal Inspires at Girl Up STEM for Social Good Tour

Following this summer’s successful Girl Up leadership summit—where Booz Allen returned as a key sponsor of the event’s STEM Day of Action—Girl Up, an initiative of the United Nations Foundation, kicked off a STEM for Social Good Tour with dedicated bootcamps to inspire and encourage girl leaders interested in STEM issues.

Dr. Lauren Neal, a vice president at Booz Allen and leader of the firm’s health analytics work, joined the STEM bootcamp on Health and Technology and was interviewed by Girl Up Leader Aarzoo Sharma—fielding questions on space exploration, how to find a career in STEM, and more.

Neal joined fellow speakers including the 2016 Nobel laureate in chemistry, Sir James Fraser Stoddart, and addressed an audience of young leaders in grades 6-12. Here are some of the highlights.

“One of the things I love about being at the intersection of health and technology is that I get to work on really cool problems,” Neal said. She explained that health analytics, modeling, and artificial intelligence (AI) are capabilities that cross over into a wide range of areas, including space exploration.

“I was so excited to watch Perseverance touch down on Mars back in February with my two little kids,” she said. “Just as it takes teams of engineers to make space exploration real, it also requires experts in data science and artificial intelligence—and those who have an understanding of health sciences.”

Deep space travel subjects human beings to a variety of physical and mental stressors: radiation, isolation, and more, with astronauts far beyond the reach of medical intervention.

“We need new tools and technologies to deal with all of the risks, and it’s going to take insights from all sorts of people, like laboratory scientists, clinicians, and biomedical engineers,” Neal said.

Fortunately, she said, “There’s so much data that we can harness to get a better picture of astronauts’ overall health. That includes clinical, laboratory, and genomics data; data from biomedical sensors; and data that tracks health before, during, and after space travel.”

Neal has led engagements for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, and military health organizations. She’s also worked with teams to develop solutions to analyze electronic health record data, wearable data, and medical imaging data to advance population health surveillance and precision medicine.

Girl Up leaders and participants in the Health and Technology bootcamp asked Neal if she had a favorite among these projects. Neal cited several examples, including work with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). Here, teams of design engineers and data scientists analyze survey data and other information to understand the journey of veterans seeking care and make the experience better.

 “We’re also starting to introduce a lot of new machine-learning efforts to look for anomalies in data, to understand where there might be issues and where veterans are not getting the benefits they’re supposed to,” she said.

Neal continued, highlighting her work and what it means to use STEM for social good. “We’ve worked with a nonprofit that focuses on human trafficking,” she said, explaining how Booz Allen employees used data from publicly available data sources and simple automation techniques to build a map of these criminal networks.

“There’s so much data out there that you can just get your hands on and pull it in and analyze,” she said.

Neal also talked about:

• Mapping land parcels to figure out ways to provide affordable housing
• Using satellite imagery to study deforestation
• Developing speech-to-text apps that open up communications options for people with disabilities 

Neal also offered advice to Girl Up leaders about how girls could build more confidence in their abilities.

A supportive community is critical, she said, relating the story of Booz Allen’s Women in Data Science group, an organization which she helped found.

“It all started for me when I was studying electrical engineering, and I realized there weren’t very many women in most of my classes,” she said. As she progressed in her career, she realized “there were definitely way more women in data science and analytics—but still fewer than there should have been.”

In 2016, Neal analyzed U.S. census data to learn more. She thought she would definitely she’d see the trend lines going upward, but her analysis revealed the opposite.

“I was pretty shocked, so I presented the data at a Booz Allen networking event,” she said.

Her report generated interest in ways to support women in data science careers. From here, Booz Allen’s Women in Data Science group was born.

“We’ve done so many great things,” Neal said, citing work with nonprofits, hackathons, networking events, and more. “We really focused on giving women the opportunity to lead and showcase their technical skills. I’ve learned so much from the members of the group.”

Most recently, the group took on critical pro bono work with Feeding America to use data science to source food donations—developing a methodology and supporting tools to estimate recoverable food at local, state, and national levels amidst food insecurity issues caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Having groups like Women in Data Science and Girl Up is so important because we can all be champions for each other. We can learn together and build confidence in a safe, supportive environment,” Neal said.

Learn more about space solutions at Booz Allen and the firm’s work in data science and artificial intelligence.