Sarah Jiang
PhD Student
Biomedical Engineering
About Me:
Sarah Jiang is a second-year PhD student in the BIG IDEAs Lab at Duke University, where she focuses on deep learning for wearable health data and its applications to real-world healthcare challenges. A proud "forever Blue Devil," she earned both her B.S.E. in Biomedical Engineering and B.A. in Computer Science from Duke University. Her research interests span foundation models and representation learning for wearables, multimodal machine learning, and understanding how social determinants of health influence both measured and predicted health outcomes. Her current work investigates distribution shifts in wearable data within the All of Us Research Program and evaluates how representation quality varies across devices and study designs.
A recipient of the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP), Sarah approaches research with equal parts curiosity and rigor. Inspired by technology leader Mira Murati, she is driven by a passion for building machine learning systems that are both innovative and impactful.
A former Apple Watch devotee, Sarah now favors the Garmin Vivoactive for its ability to gamify sleep and recovery without feeling like a smartphone on her wrist. Fueled by any fun (often caffeinated) beverage and often accompanied by lo-fi playlists, she can most likely be found working from a coffee shop or sunlit terrace. Outside of research, Sarah enjoys exploring trails around the Triangle and has an impressive musical background, having earned the equivalent of a bachelor's degree in piano performance through the Royal Conservatory of Toronto. She celebrates wins with loved ones, finds comfort in reading, and lives by the advice, "Luck favors the prepared mind." One day, she hopes to travel to every continent.
