Data Science Major Danielle Grunwald Will Become an Axtria Analyst

Graduating NJIT senior Danielle Grunwald and her employer as of this summer, Axtria Inc., are made for each other — Grunwald loves digging into life sciences data to extract useful insights, and that’s the gist of what Axtria does.

Grunwald is wrapping up her studies with a B.S. in data science from Ying Wu College of Computing. She was also an Albert Dorman Honors College scholar, the only female member of the NJIT bowling team (personal high score 268), active with the Nucleus yearbook and an event coordinator for the Student Activities Council.

“The minute I came onto this campus, I knew that this is where I wanted to be,” said Grunwald. “Since I was a kid, I've always been interested in mathematics. I would have a placemat and I would do the times tables.”

But entering Wall Township’s Business and Finance Academy, Grunwald wanted to study business or journalism. She wound up helping start a computer science club and took difficult courses such as statistics. At NJIT, she had a life-changing experience when side effects from undocumented concussions, attributed to sports injuries, began interfering with her daily life. She discovered that the same mindset used in finance and news reporting translates well into data science and the tenacity for investigating physiology.

“I realized I wanted to find that middle ground between statistics and computer science, and that's data science for you. I [also] loved that NJIT was also an R1 institute, so I knew that I could come here and do research.”

“I really like that people appreciate just how flexible it is, how adaptable it is to creating solutions. So in data science, someone can come up to me and go, ‘I need this to be analyzed, or I need X, Y and Z, I need to find a solution to a problem,’ … Being able to actually understand why certain data is doing what it's doing, or why data is acting the way it's acting, you can do that with data science. You can find the answers to a lot of those problems. And I think that that's something that's really interesting.”

That approach, along with mentoring from her favorite computing faculty — including professor James Geller, assistant professor Amy Hoover, senior university lecturer Pantelis Monogioudis and assistant professor Margarita Vinnikov — readied Grunwald for a data science career, beginning when she landed a summer 2024 internship at Axtria. Her primary assignment was to build a custom AI language model trained on the company’s existing library of written documents, so employees could quickly assemble new documents that would use their own facts and style. She’ll continue some of that work as an employee starting in late July, but will also have an expanded role as an analyst, assisting Axtria’s clients in evaluating their own data that could lead to new answers for any manner of complicated life sciences problems.

Outside of school and work, Grunwald also does her own research on memory loss, which she personally experienced from her injuries. She wanted to discover how AI can be used for early detection of dementia cases, using the data modeling skills she learned in class.

“I really love finding the answers to complex data sets. … You're essentially putting pieces of the puzzle together to create the overall picture and message that you need from that modeling and analytics. So I really love working with machine learning, and I love working with AI, so my dream job would be to do that, and with Axtria so far it's exactly what I've been able to do.”

Grunwald’s advice to new students is to keep pushing even if you initially fail at something. “I've seen it as a learning opportunity. No matter what I've done, whether it was successful or maybe it wasn't as successful, I've seen that everything you do here and outside of NJIT is a learning moment,” she said. “Put your foot in the door to any opportunity you may be interested in. You never know where it will take you or what could happen. NJIT is a great environment to take chances outside of your comfort zone.”

“She was one of my top students in Introduction to Generative AI and continues to brighten my day when I run into her on campus. In the classroom I was struck by the depth of the questions that she was asking. It was clear that she was thinking deeply about what she was learning,” Hoover stated. “She oozes confidence in her quest to satisfy her own curiosity and reminds me a bit of how Feynman wrote about the joy in figuring out how things work. I would assume many researchers feel this joy. I am positive that Danielle will be successful in any career that she chooses.”