Student Fellows
(project description available here)
Rowana Ahmed, Fellow
Master’s Student, Health Data Science
Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Project: Developing Ensemble Methods for Initial Districting Plan Evaluation
Rowana Ahmed is a Master’s student in the Health Data Science program at Harvard University. She earned her BSE and MSE in Bioengineering from the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to starting her graduate program at Harvard, Rowana worked as a Technology Consultant at Accenture and later as an Analytics Manager at Humanyze, a people analytics startup dedicated to improving organizational health using social network analysis.
Rowana’s research focus is in social determinants of health, and she is particularly interested in harnessing the power of data science to design public policy aimed at improving health equity. She is excited to work with the DSSG team this summer to help curb gerrymandering practices for more just and fairer elections.
Katherine Chang, Fellow
Ph.D. Student, Education Policy, Organizations, and Leadership
University of Washington
Project: Developing Ensemble Methods for Initial Districting Plan Evaluation
Katherine’s research agenda is composed of three strands of inquiry: the politics of education reform, the politics of race in education policymaking, and cross-systems interactions between social and education policy. Her dissertation examines the political institutions engaged in court-mandated school finance reform and interrogates the racialized geographies tied to educational funding gaps. Katherine primarily uses quantitative and computational social science methods in her research, with particular interest in social network analysis and text-as-data methods.
Katherine’s graduate studies are part of her continued journey to train in equitable data practices and responsible, justice-centered research. She is looking forward to participating in DSSG to realize data-driven solutions for mediating social inequities and to promote ambitions towards research rooted in social good.
James Lamar Foster, Fellow
Ph.D. Candidate, Education Policy, Organizations, & Leadership
University of Washington
Project: Geography, equity, and the Seattle $15 minimum wage ordinance
James Lamar Foster is a Ph.D. Candidate at The University of Washington’s Education Policy, Organizations, and Leadership program in the College of Education. His work investigates questions at the intersections of race, place, policy, and practice. His current research uses analytical approaches from critical and organizational theory in concert with computational methods to understand how school leaders create conditions to foster marginalized students’ social-emotional development. Lamar has been interested in the work of DSSG fellows since arriving at the University of Washington. Their focus on computational methods and social good piqued his interest, which prompted him to apply. He is particularly excited to work on the Geography, Equity, and the Seattle $15 minimum wage ordinance project, which explicitly focuses on equity, policy, and place. In his free time, Lamar enjoys spending time with friends and family and watching Manchester United F.C.
Delaney Glass, Fellow
Ph.D. Student, Biological Anthropology
University of Washington
Project: Geography, equity, and the Seattle $15 minimum wage ordinance
Ryan Goehrung, Fellow
Ph.D. Candidate, Political Science Department
University of Washington
Project: Developing Ensemble Methods for Initial Districting Plan Evaluation
Christopher Salazar, Fellow
Incoming Ph.D. Student, Industrial and Systems Engineering
University of Washington
Project: Geography, equity, and the Seattle $15 minimum wage ordinance
Michael Gregory Souffrant, Fellow
Ph.D. Candidate, Computational Biophysical Chemistry
Georgia State University
Project: Developing Ensemble Methods for Initial Districting Plan Evaluation
Mahader Tamene Fellow
Ph.D. Student, Epidemiology
University of California, Berkeley’s School of Public Health
Project: Geography, equity, and the Seattle $15 minimum wage ordinance
Mahader has worked in community health education, health research, program implementation and evaluation both domestically and abroad. She holds an MSc in global health and population from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a BA in public policy and African/African-American studies from the University of Chicago.
Project Leaders
(project description available here)
Noah C. Benson, Data Scientist
Senior Data Scientist, eScience Institute
University of Washington
In addition to his research activities, Noah has a keen interest in community engagement, political activism, and human rights advocacy, and he is excited about the opportunity to leverage his data-science expertise to approach such topics through the DSSG program this summer.
Daryl DeFord, Project Lead
Assistant Professor of Data Analytics
Washington State University, Department of Mathematics and Statistics
Project: Developing Ensemble Methods for Initial Districting Plan Evaluation
Dharma Dailey, Human Centered Design Mentor
Data Science Postdoctoral Fellow
University of Washington
Dharma Dailey is a UW Data Science Postdoctoral Fellow at the eScience Institute working with research scientist Anissa Tanweer to understand how human centered design practices can be incorporated into data intensive research. She is the Human Centered Design Mentor for eScience’s Data Science for Social Good Program. She coaches DSSG teams to explore the social dimensions of their projects as a team, interact with stakeholders, and integrate that awareness into project work. She is also working with a coalition of Data for Good organizers to document better practices for running Data Science for Social Good Programs.
Bernease Herman, Data Scientist
Data Scientist, eScience Institute
University of Washington
Project: Developing Ensemble Methods for Initial Districting Plan Evaluation
Jose M. Hernandez, Data Scientist
Data Scientist, eScience Institute
University of Washington
Project: Geography, equity, and the Seattle $15 minimum wage ordinance
Jose has worked most of his career in the social science/education data science research space. My current work focuses on applying machine learning methods to extract novel data sources from large administrative data sets that are used to inform policy making in education and housing.
Jose’s research and data science project interests are informed by his lived experiences as a first generation high school graduate raised in a Latinx immigrant community in South Central Los Angeles and Santa Ana, CA. Jose is excited for the opportunity to participate in DSSG and learn about the impacts of minimum wage policies locally, as well as the opportunity to collaborate with this year’s fellows.
Vaughn Iverson, Data Scientist
Research Scientist, eScience Institute
University of Washington
Project: Developing Ensemble Methods for Initial Districting Plan Evaluation
Vaughn joined the eScience Institute in January of 2016 and contributes expertise in development of high performance parallel software, web technologies, noSQL databases, and data compression and visualization techniques. Vaughn is the author and maintainer of several popular open source packages and is an active contributor to many others.
Vaughn earned his PhD in Biological Oceanography from the University of Washington in 2015, and also holds a MS in Computer Science from the University of Washington, Seattle and a BS in Computer Science and Chemistry from Washington State University, Pullman. Prior to commencing his PhD work, Vaughn spent over a decade in the computer industry working for Intel Corp as a Staff Research Scientist developing video compression, internet media streaming and content distribution technologies, for which he was awarded twenty US patents.
Vaughn looks forward to participating in the DSSG program each summer. Collaborating with the fellows, project leads and UW colleagues on challenging and impactful projects, and having a lot of fun while doing it, is a uniquely enjoyable and rewarding benefit of being affiliated with the UW eScience community.
Jennie Romich, Project Lead
Associate Professor, School of Social Work
University of Washington
Project: Geography, equity, and the Seattle $15 minimum wage ordinance
As the principal investigator of the Washington Merged Longitudinal Administrative Data, Romich is excited to work with the DSSG summer project as a way of learning about data science techniques applicable to large-scale administrative data set. She looks forward to answering some heretofore unanswerable questions about residential mobility and poverty policy.
Valentina Staneva, Data Scientist
Senior Data Scientist, eScience Institute
University of Washington
Project: Geography, equity, and the Seattle $15 minimum wage ordinance