Short Introduction

Kira E. Scarpignato is expected to graduate with a B.S. in Biomedical Engineering and a minor in Biology in May 2024 Florida Institute of Technology. She graduated with a rank of 1 out of 400 students at Port St. Lucie High School and currently holds a 4.0 GPA in her major.

In the summer of 2020, she was selected for the highly competitive Werner H. Kirsten Internship Program (WHKSIP) at the military base Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland. While WHKSIP did not run as expected due to COVID, she participated in a summer lecture series presented by researchers that included topics such as ethics in research. From January 2018 to April 2021, she also ran a family-owned journalism company called the Association of Objective Journalists, Inc. Her involvement in the company primarily involved managing the advanced news website, conducting in-depth SEO research and optimization for the website, and using Google Analytics to assess the traffic and on-site ad effectivity.

Ms. Scarpignato was involved in the SIDDIS project from January 2022 to June 2022. Her part in SIDDIS involved translating MATLAB code to Python for L1 and L2 baseline distance ranking based on topography for predicting super-resolution of a flood inundation map, developing a parallelization method including both the Dask and Optuna libraries in Python, and running test data.

She is currently working in Dr. Bashur’s research lab involving tissue engineering for small-diameter arteries at Florida Institute of Technology. In the future, Ms. Scarpignato plans to pursue a Ph.D. and become a professor at a university working on research relating to biomolecular or tissue engineering.