Kristal (Jingyu) Zhou earned her B.S. in Nursing with a minor in Business Management at Case Western Reserve University. She is currently a first year Master of Science student in Public Health with a concentration in Health Informatics at Yale University. Kristal is an active member in Alpha Mu Chapter of the Sigma Theta Tau International Honor Society of Nursing.

Kristal became interested in connecting health outcomes with technology during her clinical experience at the outpatient setting. She had received telehealth training and provided tele-counseling to her outpatient patients. From then, she was fascinated to see how technologies can help transform a patient's healthcare experience. She hopes that telehealth will help address the barriers in healthcare access and thus more people can enjoy better quality of health services.

As an undergraduate, Kristal developed her research interests in telehealth and electronic health records. She had presented her own research project Exploring Sociodemographic Differences in the Relationships between Electronic Health Information Use and Patient-Provider Communication Quality Perceptions at the Midwest Nursing Research Society Annual Research Conference. This ongoing research project with her undergraduate mentor is about US populations’ access to electronic healthcare resources, self-management of health, and communication with providers. 

While at Yale, Kristal is currently working as a data management and analysis assistant at Yale Department of Emergency Medicine. In this role, she performs data cleaning and analysis on patient emergency department encounters data, to support the research in exploring variation in the prevalence of common geriatric diagnoses (delirium, dementia, UTI, falls) and the association of Emergency Department diagnoses.  

Kristal wishes to continue her journey in health informatics. In the future, she hopes to gain experience with project management and data analysis.
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I overfed my cat last year so she gained 3 pounds in 6 months lol.