ESP Biography



PHYLLIS ZHANG, Junior @ Harvard studying CS & Chemistry/Physics




Major: Computer Science and CPB

College/Employer: Harvard Undergraduate Student

Year of Graduation: 2023

Picture of Phyllis Zhang

Brief Biographical Sketch:

Happy to teach with Luca this summer :D! Excited to meet all of you ~



Past Classes

  (Clicking a class title will bring you to the course's section of the corresponding course catalog)

C15052: EconCS: Algorithms for Social Good in HSSP Summer 2022 (Jul. 09, 2022)
What's the best way to match kidney donors with patients? Is ranked-choice voting everything it's made out to be, or is there a better way to vote? How do we design an auction so that people don't underbid? These questions lie at the intersection of computer science and economics and represent some of the most fascinating applications of real-world algorithms. Join us as we take a look at game theory, auctions, matching, voting theory, and more!


X14541: Knowledge is Power: Examining Educational Disparities in the United States in HSSP Summer 2021 (Jul. 10 - 31, 2021)
In this class, we'll discuss educational disparities in the United States through multiple lenses. Particularly, we'll read and discuss Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes and explore the history of American public schooling for part of the course, and for the other part of the course, we'll examine a dataset that attempts to determine how family income affects educational opportunity. To examine this data, we'll be using a few different Python packages that help us analyze large datasets. We'll also get to create our own graphs to visualize the data! We're excited to have you :)!


M14587: Fun with Probability: Birthdays, Gambling, and an Intro to Statistics in HSSP Summer 2021 (Jul. 10 - 31, 2021)
How many people do you need in a room until it is more likely than not that two have the same birthday? Should you ever gamble at Vegas? Are disease-testing methods reliable? Come spend a few hours of your summer pondering these questions and learning about how probability is applied in other fields and in daily life. We will present a lot of brain teasers involving probability and also provide a fun introduction to statistics!


S14053: The 6 Coolest Topics in Biotechnology! in HSSP Summer 2020 (Jul. 11, 2020)
Ok, maybe the title is a little subjective, but we still think these biology/biotech topics are really cool and we hope you will too! This class will teach you about 6 topics that are at the frontier of modern biology and are booming areas of research and development. These topics (in no particular order) are: 1. CRISPR (not just CRISPR babies but also other cool uses for CRISPR/Cas) 2. DNA origami and computing 3. Gene circuits and synthetic biology 4. RNA sequencing 5. 3C (chromosome conformation capture) 6. Stem cells and tissue engineering In each lecture, we'll cover the discovery/origin of each technique as well as current research and applications. Extra focus will be given to understanding primary research studies and experiments.