Maria Vaida is about to make history at Harrisburg University, soon to become the first student to earn a doctoral degree from the institution, when she graduates next month.
It’s a long way to the top for Vaida, who grew up in the shadow of an oppressive Communist regime in an industrial town located in the northern part of Romania, which is most famous for spawning the legend of Dracula.
A member of the first cohort of HU’s Data Sciences Ph.D. program established in 2017, Vaida successfully defended her research dissertation on Oct. 24, even though the COVID-19 pandemic forced the presentation to be made virtually.
Titled “Graph Neural Networks: Learning Graph Embeddings for Link Prediction and Node Classification Through HyperGraph Convolutions, Markovian Networks, and Variational Inference,” her dissertation introduced three graph algorithms with applications in the healthcare and academic domains.
Think that’s tough to digest? Vaida talks about growing up with a nation in transition, which still clung to the old traditions, particularly in regard to education.
“I remember vividly the long lines at the grocery stores, the rationing cards. I also remember the confusion, the joy and the hopes that people felt after the 1989 revolution,” she revealed.
School breaks were spent at her grandparents’ house, in a small village at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains. They were a badly-needed respite from the rigors of the classroom, as Vaida went on to spend her high-school years in an all-girls, Greek Orthodox boarding school located inside a nuns’ monastery.
“We had a very intense study schedule, with courses being taught six days a week, followed by Sunday services. The curricula included a heavy focus on theology. After high school, I decided to study journalism and social work, out of a desire to raise awareness on social issues,” she explained.
While school seemed difficult, personal matters seemed to come a little bit easier. According to Vaida’s husband, the pair met when she was a toddler, and he was 7 years old.
“He lived on the same street and recalls holding me in his arms during a visit to my grandparents. It turned out to be love at first sight. When I was 8 years old, he jokingly asked my father for my hand, which eventually became serious more than a decade later,” she explained.
“We started a family in 2008, with three beautiful children: Leah, who is 5 months old, Sarah, who just turned 10, and David, who is 12.”
Vaida settled on nesting in Cherry Hill, drawn to the warmth and the diversity of the local community, as well as the accessibility that this location offers to various relaxing destinations like the Poconos, the shore, New York City and Washington, D.C.
“It is a great town to raise a family, with wonderful teachers, great schools, and friendly neighborhoods,” she noted.
Despite indulging in such a heady subject, in the midst of a pandemic, Vaida’s path to her degree wasn’t as difficult as envisioned. Given that the rash of shutdowns and social-distancing took hold in March, when she was in the later stages of completing her work, it did not hinder her progress or delay her finishing date.
Additionally, the teaching environment at Harrisburg University had been specifically tailored for hybrid learning, which made the transition to fully-remote learning very smooth.
Currently working in the pharmaceutical field as a technical lead, Vaida hopes she can use her newly-acquired diploma to make contributions to the data science field, either through academic research or industry projects.
“I enjoy working with data, writing algorithms, and discovering new insights that can improve people’s lives. I think that data science offers tremendous opportunity in the field of personalized medicine,” she said.
