“An interdisciplinary marvel” is how Senior Associate Dean of Academic Programs and Student Experience, Khoury College of Computer Sciences Ben Hescott refers to Shannen Espinosa. She has worked in labs from Boston to London—focusing on neuroendocrinology at Boston Children’s Hospital; exploring the role of quantum computing in international law at the UN office in Geneva; studying the development of universal coronavirus vaccines at Corbett-Helaire’s Harvard biomedical lab; and merging biomedical research with computational biology in a study of Alzheimer’s disease at Oxford University.
Back home in Boston, Shannen began entering computing hackathons because she wanted “to explore how quantum computing could support biomedical innovation.” She won first place at the IBM Challenge at MIT for creating an app to facilitate organ donation, leading her to receive the Social Impact Award and an invitation to represent the U.S. in April 2025 at the International Hackathon for Social Good in Abu Dhabi, UAE.
On campus, Shannen served as a teaching fellow for courses like neurobiology and advanced programming with data. She introduced young students to robotics at a local Spanish-English bilingual elementary school, and during the pandemic, she worked with the state’s COVID-19 testing and vaccination units. Further, she volunteered as a medical assistant with the Philippine Medical Association of New England, teaching English to Syrian medical students through the nonprofit Paper Airplanes.
Interning with the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, she helped build a five-year plan to address the racial health equity gap in the state. Then she headed to Washington, D.C., as an intern for Congresswoman Lori Trahan, working on legislation that included the End Neglected Tropical Disease Act and topics such as the Disease X Act. Shannen was also nominated by the World Health Organization to serve as a working group leader at YOUNGA, the world’s largest global youth summit for social impact.
She is most proud of representing Northeastern in global quantum competitions. “I wouldn’t have even thought to mix quantum computing and humanitarian work if it weren’t for the United Nations DOC program I did through Northeastern two years ago,” she says. “It’s what kicked off this whole journey, and it’s what now drives my work on the XPRIZE in Quantum Applications, where our goal is to build something that could actually help solve a real-world, unsolved problem.”
A semifinalist for Fulbright Scholarship, Shannen will join the U.S. Naval Nuclear Laboratory in Switzerland as a Womanium Fellow after graduation, studying quantum benchmarking of Majorana fermion systems and exploring the implications for topological qubit architecture. She also plans to continue competing in the three-year global XPRIZE; her team is designing a fault-tolerant quantum framework capable of modeling a high-fidelity representation of the human cell.
