About Me

In a phrase: Speech pathologist turned data scientist. I wrangle data, crunch numbers, plot pictures, and fit models to study how children learn to speak and communicate.

I earned my Ph.D. in communication sciences and disorders in Madison, Wisconsin. On paper, I was studying speech development, word recognition and word learning in preschoolers, but over the course of my graduate training, I discovered that I really, really like programming and working with data. I get endless satisfaction from making computers do things and from solving technical problems. Functional programming makes me feel like a literal wizard. I love sharing my enthusiasm with others: Sitting down with a colleague and their dataset and coaching them through ways to analyze their data in R. Nothing feels better than giving someone that moment of feeling like a wizard.

Here are some things I might write about here:

• R
• Mixed effects models
• Bayesian statistics
• How to plot certain kinds of data
• Functional programming
• Reproducible computing
• Whatever other little thing I have learned to do recently