Congratulations to recent Stats students Nick Pace and Connor Johnson

Two recent Pitt graduates -- and Stats students -- Nick Pace and Connor Johnson, were on the 1st place winning team for the Virginia 2021 CDO Datathon. The goal of the Datathon was to come up with solutions to combat food insecurity rates in Virginia. On the subject of their project, Pace states that they, "sought to highlight our belief that there exists a discrepancy in the people who are considered eligible for the SNAP program in Virginia. The current system relies on median income level to determine a person’s eligibility, but we believe that a more extensive model that includes variables such median household income, average SNAP participation per household, unemployment rate, and percentage of minority peoples does a better job at determining the percentage of people that are food insecure."

You can view the livestream of the entire Datathon here. Note that Pace and Johnson's presentation begins at around 19:00, The awards ceremony begins at about 2:57:30.