Purdue alumnus Mark Aronson selected as U.S. Digital Corps Fellow
Aronson was selected as a fellow for his expertise in data science, artificial intelligence and technology. Aronson graduated from the John Martinson Honors College and the College of Engineering at Purdue University in 2017 with a B.S. in Biological Engineering. He later earned a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from Boston University.
The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) has selected Purdue alumnus Mark Aronson for its 2024 fellowship cohort of the U.S. Digital Corps.
The U.S. Digital Corps was launched in 2021 by various government partners. Their goal is to bring early-career technologists into government roles to drive innovative solutions to public challenges. Aronson is one of 70 fellows selected from a national pool of 2,000 applicants, contributing to federal agencies’ need for expertise in data science, artificial intelligence and technology.
Reflecting on his selection, Aronson explains that the GSA’s U.S. Digital Corps is a great opportunity for anyone in a technology-related major who wants to see what doing tech for the government looks like.
“It’s hard for me, personally, to imagine a better way to enter a career in public service," he says.
Aronson graduated from the College of Engineering at Purdue University in 2017 with a B.S. in Biological Engineering. Aronson also was in the first group of students to complete graduation requirements for Purdue's John Martinson Honors College. Aronson later earned a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from Boston University. As part of the third cohort of fellows chosen to apply their technological skills to federal service, Aronson will spend the next two years as a Data Science and Analytics Fellow at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
During his time at Purdue, Aronson took the Honors version of ANTH210, Technology and Culture, which explored the relationship between technology adoption and cultural shifts.
“The frameworks I learned in that class have been useful to think about my project work at the NIH,” he explains. “Our mission is to lay the foundation for a shift in how health disparities research is done; interconnected datasets can be used as rich training data for advanced machine learning models that will make novel discoveries in the field. The lessons from that class have been particularly useful to pull from.”
Aronson emphasizes the influence of the Honors College’s interdisciplinary approach on his work at NIH. “Being trained in a specific academic discipline is like learning the language of a field,” he notes. “The interdisciplinary training that Honors gave me, in a sense, the ability to be ‘multilingual’ in the academic disciplinary sense, and enables me to be effective in communicating between our backend developers, the front end users, and the policymakers that set the rules for how our platform functions.”
Driven by a passion for solving complex health challenges, Aronson says his long-term goal is to use data science methods to improve policy design.
“Often when a new policy is designed, the logistics of its implementation are not considered,” he explains. “A key part of the engineering design cycle, which I learned at Purdue, is that a design is then implemented, tested, and lessons learned feedback into the next iteration of the design process. My long-term goal is to use data science methods to tighten the loop of policy design, building models to predict policy outcomes based on implementation and then gathering data from that implementation to feed back into updates on the policy.”
To current students at Purdue, Aronson offers this advice: “Find a problem you want to work on, figure out the skills you want to develop, and then find the place where you can apply those skills to solve that problem. You do not need to figure this all out right out of college. In every chapter, you will learn more about yourself and make new decisions.”
Aronson’s appointment to the U.S. Digital Corps underscores Purdue’s commitment to fostering leaders dedicated to public service. His journey exemplifies how alumni can leverage interdisciplinary education and technological expertise to tackle the nation’s most pressing challenges. For more information on the U.S. Digital Corps and its application process, visit digitalcorps.gsa.gov.
Shree Balasubramaniyan
Communication Assistant for Teaching and Learning, tlcoms@purdue.edu