Work

Work experience

Tech Talent Project, Policy Research Intern, Fall 2020 View recommendations

Led an independent research project focused on bringing technology expertise into presidentially-appointed roles in the U.S. federal government
Analyzed publications and datasets on presidential appointees, engaged experts on presidential transitions, and communicated recommendations to transition stakeholders

Facebook, Data Science/Analytics Intern, Summer 2020

Analyzed user data to recommend changes to the bookmarks menu, used by 150M daily users
Designed and implemented a randomized experiment to drive product adoption for 765K users
Communicated analysis results to engineers and product managers to influence team roadmap

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Civic Digital Fellow, Summer 2019 Slides

Built dashboards to unify multiple streams of customer feedback data and automate monthly reporting, using a modular framework that ties in data from Twitter, Google Analytics, web feedback systems, and internal databases
Analyzed web traffic data from Google Analytics, built stakeholder support for unified reporting processes, and defined a roadmap for future development
Used R Shiny, with NLP applications in spaCy integrated via reticulate

Louisville Office of Civic Innovation, Innovation Intern, Summer 2018 Slides Reflection

Created Microsoft Power BI dashboards using crowdsourced Waze data to help Louisville visualize traffic patterns, pinpoint congestion points, target signaling changes, measure the impact of those changes, and make recommendations to policymakers
Evaluated impact of 7 traffic signal retiming projects using the dashboard, replacing the need to hire engineering firms to conduct studies and in turn saving $50,000+ per study
Used combination of AWS, SQL, R, and Microsoft Power BI

Leadership

Yale Daily News, Co-Founder and Co-Editor of the Data Desk, Fall 2019 to present

Built and led the Data Analytics desk within the Yale Daily News, recruiting 12+ members in its first year to increase data-driven reporting and produce interactive visualizations
Led data reporters during weekly meetings to research, develop, and publish 7 data projects
Set up a technical stack (R, D3.js, Tableau), built buy-in from management, editors, and reporters
See projects on the most popular courses at Yale Story GitHub, the shifting demographic makeup of athletic teams Story, and visualizations of New Haven crime statistics Story GitHub.

Yale Department of Statistics & Data Science, Teaching Assistant, Fall 2018 to present

Held office hours, graded student assignments, relayed student feedback to professors, and helped adapt courses to remote learning for 5 courses over 6 semesters
Courses: Causal Inference (S&DS 314), Intro Machine Learning (S&DS 355), Computational Tools for Data Science (S&DS 262), Intro Stats for Political Science (S&DS 102/3), and YData: Intro to Data Science (S&DS 123)

Yale Roosevelt Institute, Energy & Environment Center Head, Fall 2018 to Spring 2019

Led a team of 10 to research the Connecticut Green Bank, a public-private investment bank that funds renewable energy projects in Connecticut and the nation’s first of its kind
Analyzed research, interviewed regional stakeholders, and led weekly project meetings
Held conversations that led to establishing the Tech Policy research center

Yale Daily News, Photography Editor, Fall 2018 to Fall 2020

Helped lead a team of 10+ photographers to produce daily content for the print and online paper
Led expansion of our collection of stock photography, and increased year-over-year recruitment

Projects

Statistics & data science

Conducted a randomized field experiment on whether using photos in text messages increases link click-through rates. We found no significant effect of including a picture versus not including one. We used Twilio (via Python API) to send SMS messages, Rebrandly (via Python API) to generate unique trackable links, and R for analysis and visualization. Final project for S&DS 315: Measuring Impact, Prof. Josh Kalla. Report Slides GitHub
Applied natural language processing on news articles to track the US-China trade war. We scraped White House press releases and Chinese state media articles in order to apply sentiment analysis and LDA topic modeling, demonstrating that sentiment often moves in tandem with key developments in the trade war. Used selenium and BeautifulSoup in Python for scraping, dplyr and ggplot2 in R for analysis and visualization, and topicmodels in R for topic modeling. Final project for GLBL 849: Big Data & Global Policy, Prof. Casey King. GitHub
Analyzed Yale student body survey results on grading systems during the COVID-19 pandemic, comparing student support for Universal Pass versus Optional Pass/Fail and assessing barriers that students face at home. For Yale College Council. Report

Skills

Data analysis: R, Python, Stata
Data visualization: ggplot2, R Shiny, seaborn + altair, Power BI, Tableau, D3.js
Web scraping (selenium, BeautifulSoup, rvest), machine learning (scikit-learn, gensim), natural language processing (NLTK, spaCy, tidytext), GIS (in R, QGIS)
Other languages: Java, C, HTML/CSS, JavaScript

Helped write a report on how to bring young civic technologists into the public sector by creating a student loan forgiveness program, Report on inspire2serve.gov Website
Wrote a brief for Mikie Sherrill’s congressional campaign in NJ-11 regarding reversing decades of environmental mismanagement on the Passaic River, including how to hold chemical polluters accountable and enact more equitable flood insurance policy

Course final projects

How Western technology companies facilitate digital authoritarianism by selling surveillance products, acquiescing to China and Russia’s demands, and letting misinformation go unchecked, as well as key considerations for developing policy moving forward
Whether cyberwarfare will require a fundamental reframing of our understanding of national security (my take: it won’t), and breaking down the “cyber revolution” hypothesis
The potential for algorithmic bias in Sidewalk Labs’ smart city proposal, how that bias would harm populations, and how algorithmic oversight boards can help mitigate these harms Full text
The debate over the European Union Copyright Directive, including an analysis of how key tradeoffs and incentives differ among technology companies, news organizations, and EU regulators. Includes sentiment analysis of tweets from American and European users. Full text GitHub
How the urban built environment can impact residential segregation, along with a framework, data sources, and methodology that we can use to study this relationship in New York City
How to increase interoperability of electronic health records (EHRs) in the United States in order to facilitate big data in drug research, precision medicine and patient-centered care

Other

Photography

Had a photo of on-campus protests in response to Justice Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings appear in The New York Times, as well as photos of late-night study spots appear in The Atlantic. Also documented a historic comeback in the 2019 Yale-Harvard football game, Yale’s 2018 commencement, and more.
Ran a freelance photography business to photograph conferences, hackathons, speaker events, formals, theater performances, concerts, and headshots
Attended the 2018 United Nations COP 24 climate change conference as part of a photography project for Students for Carbon Dividends, a student group advocating for a carbon dividends scheme

Reference

Data science

I’ve attempted to document my technical learnings over the past few years by creating reference guides. They’re incomplete and I’m constantly adding to them, but perhaps they’ll be useful:

Course notes

These are notes I’ve compiled for courses I’ve taken, as a study and review tool. Feel free to use at your own discretion, although I make no guarantees for the accuracy of the notes or the degree to which they will represent the course as taught in future semesters.

Music & piano

Piano arrangements

Photograph by Ed Sheeran for piano solo pdf
Let It Go from Frozen for piano solo pdf
For Good from Wicked for piano solo pdf in C major pdf in Db major vocal lead

Piano notations

U by Gareth Emery for piano solo, as covered by Evan Duffy pdf
Sweet Escape by Alesso for piano solo lead sheet
I Giorni by Ludovico Einaudi for piano solo, condensed into 3 pages pdf
Kawaranai Mono from The Girl Who Leapt Through Time for piano solo pdf
For River from To The Moon for piano solo pdf

Aviation

Map of hubs of US Big Three airline companies Google Maps

Current as of December 2018, but Delta has since designated Boston (BOS) as a hub, and established focus city operations Austin (AUS), Nashville (BNA), and San Jose (SJC). Of course, all of this is up in the air because nobody knows what will happen post-coronavirus.