Skila Zhu is a rising senior at New York University, pursuing a dual degree in Data Science and Psychology Honors. Having grown up witnessing cultural barriers around mental health, she developed an awareness of how stigma and systemic inequities limit access to care. This experience has motivated her academic and professional commitment to advancing scalable, data-informed mental health interventions, and accessibility in care, particularly for marginalized populations.
This summer, Skila worked under the mentorship of Dr. Reuben Robbins to support the evaluation and implementation of the NeuroScreen project, which develops mobile cognitive screening tools for HIV-affected populations in low resource settings. Her work centered on data preprocessing and quality checks in NASA Study (Neurocognitive Assessment for South Africa Adolescents), as well as outlier detection, and statistical analysis using Python and SPSS. She contributed to exploratory regression models examining associations between neurocognitive impairment and factors such as stigma, smoking, and hazardous drinking in HIV-positive populations in the Malaysia Brain Care Project. Meanwhile, she conducted literature reviews to support future analytic directions on the tool’s cross cultural clinical utility.
This hands-on experience affirmed Skila’s passion for using quantitative tools to address global mental health disparities and gave her a sense of belonging in the field of Public Health. She looks forward to continuing her work with Dr. Robbins’ team, and plans to pursue higher graduate training in global mental health, where she hopes to help build scalable, culturally responsive interventions that make care more inclusive and accessible.