Data Science for Social Good Fellows – Summer 2018

Sean Andrew Chen is a masters candidate in applied urban science and informatics at New York University’s Center for Urban Science and Progress, a degree granting research institute at the Tandon School of Engineering. Chen received a bachelors and masters in public affairs from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School, with certificates in urban planning and policy. He has also studied urban planning at University College London’s Bartlett School of Planning, music at The Juilliard School and Mandarin at the National Taiwan University.

As the Wilson School’s Frederick P. Hitz Scholar in the Nation’s Service, Chen completed a summer internship at the White House Council on Strong Cities, Strong Communities and a two year fellowship with the US Army Corps of Engineers. At the Corps, Chen worked on geospatial analysis, infrastructure economics, and planning across the United States as well as in Southeast Asia. He was recently honored by Pacific Magazine as one of their 2017 “30 Under 30”. His work has appeared in The Chronicle for Higher Education and Next City publications. Chen’s research has focused on the interaction of technology, computational social science, and urban planning, particularly in the domain of infrastructure.

Rebeca de Buen Kalman started her Ph.D. in Public Policy and Management at the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance in 2015. Before joining the program, she worked as a corporate social responsibility analyst at KPMG Madrid and as a Program Associate at the Latin America Regional Climate Initiative sponsored by the ClimateWorks Foundation.

Rebeca is interested in a broad range of issues about environmental policy, climate change policy, transportation, and public health. She holds a BS in physics from the National Autonomous University of Mexico and an MSc in Water Science, Policy and Management from Oxford University.

Andrew Escay is an undergraduate student at the University of the Philippines Diliman, currently majoring in a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration. He is currently the Lead Data Analyst for a student initiative called UP Dashboard, where he manages a team of 10 who collects, cleans, and visualizes relevant data to be displayed on a map-based dashboard for students of the university.

Andrew was first introduced to data science during his internship in the summer of 2017 at Uber. Since then, he has earned four certificates from online classes on Applied Data Science offered by the University of Michigan. He also enjoys climbing mountains, playing board games, travelling, and eating great food.

Chris is a FLAS Fellow with the Global Studies Center in the M.S. in Computational Linguistics program at the University of Washington. He is interested in how computational systems can help interpret unstructured linguistic data for answering questions in the social sciences to inform public policy decisions. Prior to studying at the University of Washington, Chris investigated geospatial and socioeconomic models for estimating tradeoffs resulting from land use alternatives with the U.S. Forest Service as an Economics Fellow. Chris holds an M.P.P. from the University of Virginia Batten School for Leadership and Public Service.

I’m a rising junior at The Johns Hopkins University and am looking forward to joining the DSSG program this summer! At JHU, I’m studying Computer Science and Applied Mathematics & Statistics, with interests in Big Data, Machine Learning, and Applied Statistics. I am a Systems Administrator at JHU’s Institute for Data Intensive Engineering & Science (IDIES) and an active member of Baltimore’s Entrepreneurship and Innovation scene. Having taken a combination of quantitative and policy-based courses, I am excited to apply my skills to ethically solving social problems with stakeholders in Seattle.

Engaging with community leaders in Baltimore and participating in people-focused hackathons have inspired my interests in quantitative work that can positively impact communities. At MedHacks (a medical hackathon), my team developed an interactive graphical model that maps Baltimore’s low-income residents’ accessibility to federally qualified health clinics. From large publicly-available datasets, I wrote Python scripts to isolate latitude and longitude points and population sizes within a partitioned grid. Then, the mean public transit-time was calculated using a Google API, and all this was presented as an interactive heat-map integrated through a back-end web development using Flask. At IDIES, I am currently analyzing temperature data from the last five years to find patterns and eventually develop a spatial PCA for the high computing data center. I process the data, which is sampled every few seconds and added to a SQL database, to make it more useful and run queries to gain insights from statistical patterns. This summer, I hope to contribute to data-intensive projects that will have a positive and measurable impact in Seattle.

In my free time you can find me taking photos, exploring the city, or going on a hike. I enjoy tasty food and good coffee and listening to music.

Hyeon Jeong Kim is a PhD candidate in the Biology Department at University of Washington. She received a BA from Reed College and a MS from Seoul National University. Her research focuses on using non-invasive genetic methods to identify the geographic origin of transnational illegal wildlife trade. Specifically, she is studying pangolins, which hold the unfortunate status as the most trafficked mammal in the world.

Her research goals include developing a set of genetic makers for population assignment and creating a range-wide genetic database of pangolins to identify poaching hotspots. She is using a combination of detection dogs, high-throughput sequencing, and forensic methods for her research. She splits her time between the lab working on genetics and the field searching for pangolin fecal samples with detection dog teams of Conservation Canines. This work is supported by the USAID Wildlife Crime Tech Challenge.

My tryst with Data Science began at a consulting firm after graduating in Electrical and Electronics Engineering. I love Data Science because it fascinates the problem solver in me and I see it as a creative process of discovering beautiful stories out of random numbers. Before coming to grad school, I worked for a non-profit called Teach for India for two years, where I was involved with teaching and community development in low income schools. My work there helped me realize that non-profits and policy makers are yet to take leverage of the Data Science revolution. I am passionate about applying Data Science to projects that create positive social impact.

Being a fellow at Data Science for Social Good program is an effort in that direction. I am currently pursuing my graduate studies in Statistics at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and applied statistics in social science research is one my areas of interests. I am looking forward to spending my summer with two things I am incredibly passionate about- Data Science and Social Good.

Kellie MacPhee is a Ph.D. candidate in the Mathematics Department at the University of Washington. She is also affiliated with the Algorithmic Foundations for Data Science Institute (ADSI), and enrolled in the eScience Institute’s Advanced Data Science Option. Her advisor is Dmitriy Drusvyatskiy, and her research is in optimization, with a focus on duality theory and algorithm analysis.

Kellie has previously interned at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, through their National Security Internship Program, and prior to coming to the U.W., she earned her B.A. in Mathematics from Dartmouth College (with a minor in Japanese Language and Culture). Outside of mathematics, Kellie is interested in education and equity issues. She also plays on the U.W. Women’s Club Water Polo team.

I am a PhD student in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Washington, specializing in computational linguistics. My current research is on automated information extraction from research papers in the field of medicine. I am also interested in the intersection of natural language processing with computational social science, and in particular, modeling how different communities use language to construct identities online. I’m thrilled to join the Data Science for Social Good program!

Tessa Schneider holds a Bachelor of Arts in Global Studies from the University of Minnesota. During her bachelor’s studies, she organized sustainable development projects in Ecuador and Honduras and facilitated the environmental justice taskforce with the Minnesota Public Interest Research Group. Her bachelor’s thesis explored the role of micro-finance in promoting social justice in Latin America. She later conducted field interviews with displaced persons in Ecuador to determine the long-term impacts of humanitarian aid efforts with the University of South Florida. Out of interest for the public sector she became a teacher through the Philadelphia Teaching Fellows. She taught students with disabilities in Philadelphia, before becoming a science teacher and coordinator in the Abu Dhabi public school system.

Driven by her passion for social justice at the policy level, she pursued a master’s in public policy at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin, Germany, focusing on policy analysis and refugee integration. During her master’s studies, Tessa analyzed surveys from refugees and German populists with Social Science Works using R and STATA, co-authored a book chapter on educational barriers facing refugee youth in Germany with the Expert Council of German Foundations on Integration and Migration and co-facilitated the Hertie Social Response Group, which organizes policy-related service projects with migrants and refugees in Berlin. Her master’s thesis focuses on identifying the barriers recent migrants face in integrating into the labor markets of the United States and Germany.

Woosub Shin is a second-year master’s student in Biostatistics at the University of Michigan, expected to graduate in Spring 2018. During his time at U-M, he served as a graduate student research assistant at the Kidney Epidemiology & Cost Center, working on missing data problems of electronic health records. Besides statistics, he has a broad range of interests including large-scale optimization, data-driven decision making, and quantitative social science.

In his free time, Woosub enjoys hiking, reading books, solving not-too-hard math problems, and exploring great coffee shops.

Andrew Taylor is a second year Masters of Public Administration Candidate at the University of Washington Evans School of Public Policy and Governance. Previously, Andrew was a Health Equity Graduate Student Fellow with the Foundation for Healthy Generations. Andrew’s research focuses on criminal justice reform, and the intersection between criminal justice and health.

From bail reform, to analyzing case processing and correctional case management, the interdisciplinary techniques explored at the eScience Institute have the potential to radically transform criminal justice research. The Data Science for the Social Good Fellowship provides an exceptional opportunity to collaborate with an expert team, and develop strategies for use of data science in the public sector. Andrew is ecstatic to be invited to participate in the fellowship this summer.

I am currently a PhD student in Information Science at the University of Washington. My research interest revolves around open data, data science, and reproducible research. I received my B.E. in Remote Sensing from Wuhan University, China, and received my M.S. in Geoinformatics from Department of Earth System Science, Tsinghua University, China.

Haowen Zheng is a current master’s student in Applied Quantitative Research program at New York University Sociology Department. Her research interests include social stratification and mobility, education sociology, and gender inequality. She is interested in adopting quantitative analytical methods on large datasets to study how inequality is produced and reproduced over people’s life course and across generations. Haowen obtained her Bachelor’s degree from Beijing Foreign Studies University, China, and majored in English Language and Literature.