Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center is the world’s oldest and largest private cancer center. I worked as part of a team to design an open source internal repository for Memorial Sloan Kettering’s engineers. The purpose of the repository was for the engineers to store and share their code that helps advance the institution’s machine learning and data science initiatives.
At the start of our project, the hospital's research teams were using data to create cutting edge machine learning initiatives, but many of the data scientists worked in silos. We reasoned a single repository for all projects (with appropriate context) would help the institution push their work much further. A shared repository would eliminate "double work" and allow people working in different buildings or departments to not only know what others were working on, but could use that work to enhance their own. In real life terms, for instance, this could mean making it easier for a patient to be matched with an appropriate (and very specific) clinical trial at a moment in their lives when time is of the essence.
It was a pleasure to work on such a crucial project, and to know that our contributions literally helped these scientists save lives.
