Su Yeon Bae

How have you contributed to one of CDC’s priorities through your ASPPH/CDC Fellowship assignment? Explain what you have done that has “made a difference” at
CDC and benefitted public health in the United States.

At CDC-INFO, one of my priorities is to respond to programs’ data-related inquiries by providing the topic- or question-specific data. I provide them call center data with organized reports as well as the relevant context that can supplement the data. By using CDC-INFO data, the programs are able to fill the gaps in the information they may be missing and improve resources designed to reach their target audiences.

Within CDC-INFO, I maintain and improve the existing reports to ensure that our data systems are operating at an optimal level of efficiency. For example, I have recently built a new interactive dashboard called the Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system report that reduced a significant amount of manual analysis and presented the limitations and areas of improvement of an existing analysis report. Using the data and reports, our team, call center agents, and vendors are able to connect with the general public and recognize what the public is asking and
what they are most interested in. I strive to provide more effective visualizations that can be shared with various stakeholders who are part of our response so they can provide the most effective and efficient ways to serve the public.

How will your fellowship experience shape your career?

Through my fellowship experience so far, I believe I enhanced my technical (data management, visualization, analysis) and practical (communication, collaborative) skills. Building and modernizing reports that fit the needs of stakeholders introduced me to find the most innovative and practical ways to deliver data. These data skills will help me engage directly with large-scale data and develop the methods to analyze it in my future career. In addition, interacting with different programs daily has helped me consider different ways to communicate data more effectively and clearly. I wish to learn the technique of translating data into a language that everyone can understand as well as helping everyone access data in a way that they are most comfortable with, using my data science skills. This would be transferable to any type of work setting in my future career.

Describe specifically some of the relationships/partnerships you have built through the fellowship and how those relationships have helped/will help you in your career.

I am constantly interacting with my mentors and colleagues from a variety of different roles and backgrounds. Part of the reason why I enjoy working in my current role is that it requires a lot of collaboration when making a decision or developing a new tool. On the data side, we need inputs and feedback from all of our team members to build an effective, comprehensive report that can be used by everyone. Our team discusses and shares updates daily during team meetings and this makes me learn about different sides of our jobs, not just on the CDC side, but also on the vendors side as well. My mentors and teammates have been nothing but supportive and open to hearing any challenges or feedback to maximize my experience here at CDC. I can openly share my thoughts and discuss any ideas with them, and I am excited to hone my collaboration skills by working with them, which will greatly help me in my career.