From formula to field

After hours of hiking deep into the thick rainforest of Madagascar, Akshaya Annapragada finally reached the group's destination-a tiny village of wood and grass buildings. The party entered the clearing, setting down gear they had lugged through the marshy undergrowth. Shielding her eyes against the blinding sun, Annapragada spotted the team's objective scratching at the muddy ground. They had come halfway around the world to study chickens. Annapragada, A.B. '20, an applied math concentrator at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), spent part of the summer in the African island nation, working with Christopher Golden , Research Scientist at the Chan School of Public Health, and his team to study the impacts of vaccinations on the poultry flocks of the Malagasy villagers. The fieldwork was part of a new fellowship program, the Planetary Health Undergraduate Scholars, sponsored by the Henry David Thoreau Foundation. For millennia, these rural communities subsisted on bush meat, like wild lemurs and birds, but villagers more recently have shifted to domesticated poultry as a protein source, Annapragada explained.