Khoury News
Climate solutions require data solutions. Jeff Pan wants to find both
When he added data science to his environmental science degree before his junior year, Jeff Pan had no idea just how many adventures awaited him. But like any clutch playoff team, he shone in the second half.
By any measure, Jeffrey Pan’s accomplishments as a data science undergraduate would be impressive. Two co-ops doing work he found meaningful and impactful. Concurrent research projects across multiple prestigious institutions. Mentoring peers as a teaching assistant. Being named a Huntington 100 scholar.
And it’s all even more impressive given that he was a full-time data science student for only two of his undergraduate years.
Pan, who graduated in May, started his Northeastern journey as an environmental and sustainability sciences major in the College of Science. While focusing on environmental science, he says he began to feel “like I was just missing a piece of my education.”
Pan comes from a family of coders who instilled in him a passion for sustainability. That, along with his growing awareness that he would need deep data knowledge to combat climate change, compelled him to add data science to his degree as a junior. It was the missing piece —and the one that would define the rest of his academic journey.
“I found out that there are so many different complex data sets … to measure how the environment and climate are changing. It's a whole different scope that I never really discovered up until my junior year,” he says. “I'm very grateful there's a combined major at Northeastern that allows me to use complex theories and code to solve one of the world's biggest problems.
During his first co-op as an energy data analyst at Veolia North America in Boston, Pan was part of a large-scale consulting project on carbon emissions that made him “fall in love with using coding languages and database tools” to tackle global climate change.
He and his team analyzed clients’ carbon and energy output metrics — comprising “billions of watts of energy,” he says — then built dashboards and visualizations that enabled clients to understand and reduce their emissions and usage. Pan found the experience so rewarding that after his co-op, he stayed on for a series of full- and part-time stints.
“I felt like it was contributing to a pretty awesome mission,” he says. “They gave me the opportunity to use all the tools that I'd been learning in school and apply them to the real world.”
Pan’s second co-op at Woburn-based Boston Metal, in which he scaled up the process of creating carbon-free (or “green”) steels, enabled him to “learn a lot more about the intricacies of databases and how we store and warehouse all the data in the real world.”
“[If] we scale up the process of creating completely carbon-neutral steels for industry … it's going to reduce so much carbon emissions, so much energy usage, and we'll make the world a better place,” he says.
Concurrent with his classes and co-ops, Pan tackled research projects with multiple international institutions. The first, which he began in high school and continues to work on, is called “Beetlehangers.” In collaboration with Dr. Danny Haelewaters, Pan processed and cleaned data related to a newly discovered fungi called Hesperomyces harmoniae and its interactions with beetles. At the project’s outset, Pan recognized it as a “very cool interdisciplinary opportunity” that played to his own interdisciplinary bent.
“This really focuses on the ecology side of things, which I was very much exposed to in ecology science … and also database and Python and data structures and cleaning all the data, which I learned at Khoury College,” he explains.
When Haelewaters transitioned from Ghent University to the Czech Republic’s Academy of Sciences for a related project on parasitic interactions between bats, bat flies, and Laboulbeniales fungi, Pan followed, basing his senior research project (overseen by John Rachlin) on the work.
“The idea is to create a robust, structured database model to store these new records, these new interactions between a bat, its parasite — the bat fly — and then the bat fly’s parasite, the fungi,” Pan says of the project, on which he also remains a researcher post-graduation.
Human connection in a digital world
In reflecting on the breadth of his undergraduate experiences, Pan doesn’t hesitate when declaring which he considers the most rewarding: his two semesters as a teaching assistant in "Programming with Data.”
Pan’s desire to mentor younger students was informed by his own sometimes frustrating experiences in coding and advanced data sciences, times when “having a really good community — like all the TAs — really did help a lot,” he says.
Beyond handling thousands of questions from students, he says, he relished the opportunity to connect with others on a deeper level.
“Over four months you get close to [other students], you get to know how they learn, their learning patterns, what they’re struggling with,” he says. “You are that person to help them with everything that you can. And you learn a lot, too.”
And as the new graduate considers his past and future, he feels most grateful for that camaraderie.
“The human connection in a world that’s so digital and computer-focused is definitely the most important thing to me,” he says. “It’s not always just about using the hard skills that you’ve learned at school ... it’s also the interdisciplinary and interpersonal skills."
Even as he wades into a computing field in flux from AI advances, he leaves Khoury College grateful for all he has learned and experienced.
“I just know that I’ve gotten as much as I possibly can from this school,” he says.
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