2025 Spelman Summer Data Science Program Research (Participation in a Research Grant/Fellowship, Class of 2028)

            I was accepted into Spelman’s 2025 Summer Data Science Program as an undergraduate researcher for the political science department. Alongside two upperclasswomen, I was tasked with researching a topic of choice that combined empirical research methods from the field of political science and statistical analyses from the field of data science. My group chose to research the question: “What effect does maternal race have on infant mortality rates in the United States?” Under the mentorship of Dr. Robert Brown, an associate professor from Spelman College’s political science department, we spearheaded this project to shed light on persistent racial disparities affecting black maternal and infant health outcomes. In addition, our findings highlight how factors such as healthcare access, income inequality, and housing insecurity impact state infant mortality rates. They emphasize the need for extensive data collection on reproductive health outcomes and call for targeted policy efforts that aim to reduce preventable deaths among all children, regardless of race or creed. Using the programming platform RStudio and the programming language R, we crafted lines of code to generate national maps (as shown above) that illustrate the proportional changes in state-level infant mortality among black and white mothers from 2020 to 2023. The racial categorization of this data reveals statistics that prove that black mothers and their children face healthcare disparities at a higher rate than their white counterparts, signaling a national need for interdisciplinary data science research focused on the black community. As a result of this need, I will be expanding my research in this area.

            This photo was taken from a recording of our final research presentations which can be found at this link.

- Alyssa Amaker