Good morning, good evening, good night, wherever you are in the world! Today we welcome Jacob Zelko, who takes us on a fascinating journey from his early days as a biomedical engineering student through his work at the CDC during the COVID-19 pandemic, and into his current exploration of applied category theory. Jacob shares how his pandemic response work led him to seek more fundamental approaches to public health problems, ultimately discovering category theory as a potential framework for composing different models and analyses. We also dive into his role as leader of the Julia Health Organization, his experience as a Twitch streamer known as "The Cedar Prince," and his vision for using Julia to bridge the gap between high-performance computing and accessible health research tools.

Jacob Scott Zelko is a MS student in Applied Mathematics at Northeastern University (NEU) and a trainee of NEU's Roux Institute. Prior to this, he has worked for Georgia Tech Research Institute as a Health Data Analytics and Informatics Researcher and as a Research Engineer for the Centers for Disease Control Office of Science. In the Julia community, he is the leader of the JuliaHealth organization, a community of Julia developers who use the Julia programming language to improve medicine, health care, public health, and biomedical research. Additionally, he is the co-admin for the Julia Language's GSoC program and is the Community Manager for the AlgebraicJulia ecosystem.

Julia Health Organization: https://juliahealth.org/

Jacob's personal website: https://jacobzelko.com/

Jacob's GitHub: https://github.com/TheCedarPrince

Recorded on: 2025/05/07

Hosts: Chris Rackauckas, Michael Tiemann

Editor: Stazi

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