Education
Yale University
Bachelor of Science - Computer Science & Religious Studies
New Haven, CT
Class of 2020
Teaching Assistant: Systems Programming & Computer Organization; Data Structures; Introduction to Computer Science; Introduction to Computer Programming
Budapest University of Technology & Economics
Budapest, Hungary
June 2017 - July 2017
Course: Mobile Software Development
Evanston Township High School
Evanston, IL
Class of 2016
Technical Experience
Primary Languages
Ruby
Spearheaded as Tech Lead the development of Readiness Checks – a year-long project with a team of eight engineers that culminated in the launch of in-platform automated pre-assessments. This tool allows teachers to assess their students' prior knowledge of the upcoming unit's curriculum, then provides quick and actionable recommendations for adjustments to their lesson plan in response to the data.
Contributed to a recommendation system associated with Specialized Support Profiles (SSPs) - a hub for teachers to share knowledge about students with IEPs, 504s, and other targeted interventions. Teachers can now see SSP data along with relevant interventions for individual students directly within their lessons plans.
Redwood City, CA
January 2021 - Present
Built accessibility tools in React aimed at improving the learning experience for students with IEP's and English Language Learners including Voice Typing and Text to Speech.
Introduced handwriting recognition into the student math editor using the MyScript API, allowing students to convert their handwritten math into LaTeX and insert it directly into their document.
Used Grafana and Prometheus to visualize incoming data for all the CSTA K8S environments from MongoDB representing worldwide cyber security threats and attacks on the AT&T servers in order to debug, monitor, and track performance and resource utilization.
Enhanced 10 Java codebases for the Corporate Security & Threat Analytics (CSTA) team to remove potential security flaws indentified by Veracode Greenlight.
Built a prototype UI for the new Mobility Security Dashboard using Angular and C3.js.
Chicago, IL
June 2018 - August 2018
Political Experience
Sara Gideon for Senate
Portland, ME
July 2020 - November 2020
Supervised a team of interns for the finance team, during which time the team raised $39.4 million in the third quarter – more than any race in Maine history, second-largest for a senate race nation-wide, and quadruple our Republican opponent Susan Collins. Projects included researching donors, preparing for national fundraisers, phone banking to solicit donations from high capacity donors, and buttressing critical operations in campaign finance compliance.
Automated in Python integral tasks for the finance team including calculating giving history for potential donors, standardizing contributor information for NGP, and streamlining the generation of thank you notes in order to significantly increase efficiency and output for the whole team.
Supplemented the overarching campaign effort during Get Out the Vote by knocking on over 1,500 doors for the field team, utilizing constituent pressure to expand access to absentee voting for 10 Maine municipalities with the voter protection team, and staffing drive-in Sara Gideon rallies for the political team.
Planned Parenthood of Southern New England
New Haven, CT
September 2019 - March 2020
Worked to uphold a safe and welcoming environment despite the presence of protestors by escorting patients to the clinic and enforcing boundaries on protestors' behavior.
Redesigned the Pennsylvania House Democratic Campaign Committee website by using HTML/CSS and Wordpress plugins to adapt the Tech for Campaigns template to fit the PHDCC specifications.
Remote Volunteer
November 2019 - January 2020
Research Experience
Publications
Westerfield, C., Doolittle, B. (2021) “Spirituality of the Traumatized Child: A Call for Increased Faith Community Participation in the Trauma-Healing Process for Children.” Journal of Religion and Health.
Zhang, R., Westerfield, C., Shim, S., Bingham, G., Fabbri, A., Verma, N., Hu, W., Radev, D. (2019) “Improving Low-Resource Cross-lingual Document Retrieval by Reranking with Deep Bilingual Representations.” Association for Computational Linguistics.
Fabbri, A., Li, I., Trairatvorakul, P., He, Y., Ting, T., Tung, R., Westerfield, C., Radev, D. (2018) “TutorialBank: Using a Manually-Collected Corpus for Prerequisite Chains, Survey Extraction and Resource Recommendation.” Association for Computational Linguistics.
Language, Information, & Learning at Yale
Yale University
September 2017 - May 2019
Determined the optimal re-ranking system as applied to multilingual tasks for the development of a cross-lingual information retrieval system specifically for low-density and surprise languages, with training data in Swahili and Tagalog.
Create and update the All About NLP (AAN) website interface and database with a focus on improving search queries through machine learning as part of a team of developers.
September 2017 - December 2018
Omnibus Legislation Analysis
Yale Law School
January 2019 - May 2019
Determined the most common phrases (bi-,tri-, and four-grams) in the U.S. Legal Code and mapped changes in the rankings of these phrases from 1925-2012.
Developed a data analysis sytem using Python-based NLP libraries to process opinions written by the U.S. Supreme Court Justices to draw conclusions about the complexity, sentimentality, and polarity of their writing.
October 2018 - December 2018
Andersen Lab
Northwestern University
September 2015 - July 2016
Used R to research mutations in the RAS pathway in Caenorhabditis elegans to determine possible sites of cancer in the equivalent human pathway.
Leadership Experience
Float: Yale Women in Computer Science Society
New Haven, CT
April 2019 - March 2020
May 2018 - May 2019
May 2017 - April 2018
Spearheaded the inaugural Yale Hack for Justice to encourage multi-disciplinary collaboration between Yale social justice organizations and computer science students. Emerging projects addressed reproductive justice and prison reform – one of which led to a new website for the Yale Undergraduate Prison Project.
Fostered greater community among Yale women and gender minorities in the computer science major through workshops, social events, town hall meetings with professors, and company partnerships.
New Haven, CT
April 2018 - May 2019
May 2017 - March 2018
Created pathways for women engineers at Yale to explore post-graduate opportunities by hosting professional development events and organizing group attendance at the National SWE conference.
New Haven, CT
Developed a year-long computer science curriculum applicable for students in grades 5 – 8 to teach programming fundamentals that culminated in a final project.
Organized a computer science project fair for more than 120 students to showcase student progress after a year of the Code Haven curriculum.
Directed a conference that will guide more than 50 teachers from elementary and middle schools across Connecticut on how to introduce computer science and programming software into their classrooms.
Taught computer programming and Android app development (using Scratch and MIT App Inventor) to more than 170 middle schoolers per year in New Haven middle schools.
Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics
April 2014 - May 2016
Founded first ever club at Evanston Township High School to encourage more girls to participate in higher level science courses and pursue careers in STEM. Events included organized shadow days at Northwestern University, design competitions, monthly meetings, and tutoring programs for more than 150 club members.
