Aditya (Adi) Achanta

Organization

Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston

Program

Rappaport Public Policy Fellow

Year

2020

This Rappaport Public Finance Summer Fellowship provides a stipend to students who undertake a project related to public finance. Traditionally these projects have been a continuation of work conducted in Greater Boston Applied Field Lab: Advanced Budgeting, Financial Management and Operations lab offered by Professor Linda Bilmes.

Graduate School
Harvard Medical School

Undergraduate School
University of Michigan

Mentor
Jim Segel, Chair, Rappaport Institute Advisory Board

Agency
Massachusetts COVID-19 Command Center

Supervisor
Ryan Schwarz, Director of Policy for Accountable Care, Massachusetts Executive Office of Health and Human Services

Description of Fellowship
Aditya assisted with the COVID-19 response. Since late- March he interned at Commonwealth of Massachusetts COVID-19 Command Center’s procurement and testing teams. He created and maintained a tracker for medical equipment, diagnostic equipment, and personal protective equipment offers, evaluated offers for medical equipment by regulatory requirements, technical specifications, and demand estimates, and gave recommendations for purchasing decisions. He also answered scientific and supply chain related questions for the testing team about various topics such as saliva based testing strategy, sensitivity of PCR testing during different periods of the disease course, and 3-D printed swab viability. For his final project, he wrote a white paper about government led coordination of 3-D printing capabilities to respond to medical equipment and device shortages.