Kayla Brand ’24

As an Olin College Air Partner, she is co-designing with Alternatives for Community Engagement to improve Roxbury, Boston air quality by increasing the accessibility of air quality data visualizations. Over the summer of 2022, she researched a root cause of the 85% failure rate of artificial intelligence initiatives. She designed user studies on the effectiveness around the lab’s taxonomy of AI capabilities under the mentorship of Prof. John Zimmerman and Prof. Jodi Forlizzi at the CMU Human-Computer Interaction Institute. In Spring 2022, Kayla co-revived Wellesley College Outing Club and grew it to a membership of more than 12% of the student body. She is very excited by the momentum that will be carried forward beyond her service as President of Internal Affairs. Additionally, sharing her love of the outdoors is very important to her. Under the mentorship of Olin Prof. Zachary Del Rosario in her sophomore year, she developed a machine learning model to predict the stability of thin-film triple-halide perovskites to support Prof. Rebecca Belisle’s Solar Lab’s search for efficient, stable, and affordable solar panel cells. She is currently studying Mandarin Chinese. After graduation, Kayla plans to find technical or data-based policy work supporting climate adaptation or human quality of life and go to graduate school.