Sydney Covitz

Personal bio
Sydney Covitz is a second-year Bioengineering PhD student at Stanford and recently joined the Neuromuscular Biomechanics Lab (NMBL), led by Principal Investigator Dr. Scott Delp. NMBL leverages expertise in biomechanics, computer science, imaging, robotics, and neuroscience and applies cutting edge computational methods of human movement analysis to the areas of clinical research and sports performance. Her current project aims to use video-capture data to develop kinematic-based upper extremity functional scores for patients with neuromuscular disorders. She is also working on a startup that aims to ease the burden of immigration paperwork by providing automated error-checking and translation services and teaches a biannual course for high school students on interview skills as part of Stanford Splash. Before coming to Stanford, she spent three years working as a Neuroinformatics Software Engineer at the University of Pennsylvania's Lifespan Informatics and Neuroimaging Center (PennLINC) on a team that creates tools and reproducible processing pipelines for analysis of brain MRIs. While there, she was promoted twice, co-authored 14 publications, built a software package that now has over 5k downloads, gave two invited talks, and presented her work at conferences around the world. Further, she believes spending time with patients to be absolutely critical for anyone looking to make an impact in human-centered, clinically translational research, and as such, spent two years volunteering on the Neurology floor at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

Currently teaching