Aliya Laliwala

Aliya Laliwala is a freshman at New Jersey Institute of Technology, where she is majoring in computer science. In high school, she was the captain of programming for her school’s robotics team, where she led her team to place at the FIRST Inspires Robotics Competition. At graduation, she received the departmental award in both Computer Science and STEM. Through her school’s STEM Academy, she designed an engineering notebook for a delivery drone for the Real World Design Challenge. During the summer, Aliya worked in the Group Summer Scholars Research Program with Dr. Niepielko at Kean University. Studying BioInformatics, she researched and analyzed the Covid-19 protein sequence. Integrating technology, she used Pymol 3D software to cross reference different variants into 3D models. She presented the cutting-edge research, as well as the Phylogenetic tree she created, to show the origin of the Covid-19 virus, to more than 300 people at the university. In the future, she hopes to integrate both technology and science to innovate something new and help others.