CDC SNAPS UP 2022 GRAD WITH IMPRESSIVE CODING SKILLS AND PHARMACY KNOWLEDGE

The past few years have made it plain that when it comes to good health, data analysis and nationwide communication can be the difference between life and death for so many people.

Lipscomb alumna Sena Seged (’19, Pharm.D./MHCI ’22) was on the case for our nation even before she graduated, bringing her number-crunching skills and pharmacy credentials to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention through a month-long rotation in November 2021 and now as a full-time employee of the CDC’s National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion.

In her rotation during her fourth-year in the Lipscomb College of Pharmacy, Seged worked with the PROTECT Initiative (Prevention of Overdoses and Treatment Errors in Children Task Force) on national-scale efforts to prevent overdoses of overthe-counter medications.

She also organized and analyzed 60 million rows of data on over-the-counter overdoses from 2014 until 2021 to discover the most commonly abused OTC medications reported on during that period. That information helped CDC officials create guidelines for medical professionals to help treat and prevent such overdoses nationwide, she said.

Before she arrived, her CDC mentors expected that project to take a year just to analyze the data. Using her informatics knowledge and coding skills, she was able to synthesize all the data during her one-month rotation.

No surprise that CDC officials scooped her up for a fulltime job as soon as she graduated with her Doctor of Pharmacy and Master of Science in healthcare informatics in May 2022.

Read more about Seged at lipscomb.edu/gradmhci.