Noelle Kristen Smith
Noelle “Kristen” Smith is majoring in Health and Societies, with a concentration in Public Health, and minoring in Neuroscience and Health Care Management at the University of Pennsylvania. After graduating from Penn next year, she hopes to pursue an MPH in Health Policy and Management. Her main areas of interest include the history of American health policy and reform, bioethics, global health, and racial and socioeconomic disparities in access to care.
During SUMR, Smith worked with Ari Friedman, MD, PhD and Matthew McCoy, PhD on their project which focused on the relationship between digital tracking and discrimination due to biased data. She helped construct a database to identify those key stakeholders that provide health information in order to analyze and assess the demographic information it yields. She came to better understand how the broadening influence of big data may perpetuate stigmas already engrained within minority and low-income communities.
At Penn, Kristen is the President of Off the Beat A Cappella, Penn’s premier rock and pop a cappella group, as well as the Diversity Chair of a Women’s Philanthropic Organization. She is also a member of Wharton Undergraduate Healthcare Club and is currently working on a senior honors thesis about the role of mainstream and alternative sources of media in influencing American health care reform efforts. In her free time, she enjoys reading, baking, watching Netflix, and spending time with family and friends.