Congratulations to Roshan Naik, who was selected as the 2025 Congressional App Challenge winner for North Carolina’s 10th Congressional District for his webapp, Nation Vitals.
Congressman Pat Harrigan’s office notified Roshan that the app will be displayed in the U.S. Capitol for one year and featured on House.gov and the official Congressional App Challenge site. He will also be invited to #HouseofCode in the U.S. Capitol in April 2026!
Roshan created the app building on core skills of Python, Web development and Statistics, drawing from his courses at Pine Lake Prep.
His app, NationVitals, is an interactive, user-friendly visual analytics webapp for exploring US county-level trends in drug overdose, suicide mortality, mental health, and their relationship to infrastructure, crime, politics, and sociodemography.
“NationVitals empowers communities, policymakers, and researchers to access and act on hyper-local disparities,” Roshan said.
The app uses publicly sourced data, including NVSS/WONDER overdose and suicide rates (county), CDC PLACES mental-health (county), ACS 5-year socioeconomic and demographic covariates, County Health Rankings’ violent-crime proxy, MIT Election Data Lab’s, U.S. Senate county-level results, etc.
“It is built using Python, SQL, and MapLibre, and it taught me how data science can translate complexity into insight and impact when you combine amazing fields like CS and data science together,” he said.
NationVitals collates all these by county and by years from 2018-23, normalizes the data, and establishes correlations between the covariates, while controlling for other factors.
Users can log on to the web app and choose a particular year and set of counties to explore the relationships and statistical significance of these “vital signals” of their well-being. They can also compare two counties at a time and use this information to petition to their local Congressperson to enact change.
“This is crucial because, despite high-quality data, we face a national crisis of misinformation and fake news. To combat this infodemic, NationVitals cites all its sources in a user-friendly, clean dashboard to communicate across language and cultural barriers,” Roshan said.
About the Congressional App Challenge
The CAC is an initiative of the U.S. House of Representatives, where Members of Congress host contests in their districts for middle school and high school students, encouraging them to learn to code and inspiring them to pursue careers in computer science. In the nine years of the Congressional App Challenge, the program has yielded over 83,000 App Challengers across all 50 states. Thousands of functional apps have been created for Congress, and participant demographics surpass all industry diversity metrics.
