Office Hours

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Data Science Office Hours provide multiple routes to get help with your research

The eScience Institute’s Data Science Office Hours program brings together expertise from across campus and outside affiliates to help triage your challenges in data-intensive science and steer you towards appropriate solutions. Between our staff data scientists, the UW libraries, UW-IT, and the other organizations listed on this page, we can help with a broad range of topics including data analysis, cloud computing, AI/ML, high-performance computing, and software engineering, and more.

During an office hour, you can expect us to learn about your work, offer guidance for overcoming obstacles, and consult on further avenues to take your research. We may schedule a longer follow-up meeting with our team to understand the problem more deeply, or refer you to faculty on campus with relevant expertise. In addition to direct assistance and triage, we see office hours as an opportunity to brainstorm about data-intensive research questions and approaches. We fully expect that some of these discussions will lead to productive collaborative research opportunities. Some office hour collaborations have grown into full publications and new research grants!

All UW students, faculty, staff and affiliates are eligible provided that your request is regarding research being conducted as a part of the UW community. For help with course-work and academics, we refer you to UW Academic Support and the UW Libraries.


Drop-in Office Hours by Topic

During the UW Academic Year’s dates of instruction, the Institute holds regularly scheduled drop-in office hours by topic. You can find a schedule of this quarter’s topic offerings below. You can click on a given topic to RSVP for the current week. While RSVPs are not required and do not guarantee help priority, they help us gauge demand and prepare in advance if you have any special topics you would like to discuss.

If you need help with a topic that isn’t listed below, or have a scheduling conflict with the listed time, just schedule a one-on-one office hour with us instead. We can still help you!

Drop-in Schedule for Fall Quarter 2024 (September 25th – December 13th)

MondayTuesdayWednesdayThursdayFriday

Office Hours By Appointment

Year round, you can reach out to eScience staff and affiliates over email to schedule a one-on-one office hour appointment. Don’t be shy! It’s part of our job to be in touch with you about data science obstacles you’re facing. The office hour directory below is organized into the following sub-organizations:

eScience Data Scientists | UW Libraries | UW-IT and Research Computing | Amazon Web Services | Google Cloud Platform | UW-IT EIIA – Tableau & Analytics | Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences (CSSS) Statistical Consulting | Mathworks

eScience Data Scientists

We encourage questions from any area of computing in science, but tend to focus on data management, predictive analytics, and visualization.

Anthony Arendt, arendta@uw.edu

  • Community Engagement and Education
  • Open source tools in the geosciences
  • Cloud computing
  • Relational databases / SQL

Curtis Atkisson, catkiss@uw.edu

  • R
  • Bayesian statistics
  • Social Network Analysis
  • Qualitative data analysis
  • Mixed methods approaches
  • Text As Data

David A.C. Beck, dacb@washington.edu

  • Biology / bioinformatics: structural, systems, synthetic
  • Programming: Python, Shell scripting, Relational databases / SQL, Reproducibility and open science

Noah Benson, nben@uw.edu

  • Python, MATLAB, Mathematica, C, C++
  • Java, Scala, Clojure, Julia, BASH
  • Neuroinformatics and neuroimaging
  • Containerization (Docker)
  • Version control (GitHub)
  • Data sharing and visualization
  • Jupyter Notebooks

Nicoleta Cristea, cristn@u.washington.edu

  • Python, MATLAB
  • Hydrology
  • Analysis of water datasets
  • Remote sensing, spatial analysis
  • Hydrological modeling

Bryna Hazelton, brynah@phys.washington.edu

  • Astrophysics and cosmology
  • Fourier analysis
  • Statistical and mathematical modeling
  • Monte Carlo simulations
  • Version control (Git, GitHub)
  • Reproducibility and open science
  • Programming: Python, SQL, IDL, Java

Joseph Hellerstein, joseph.hellerstein@gmail.com

  • Astrophysics and cosmology
  • BASH
  • Software design
  • Web server design
  • Reproducibility and open science
  • Programming: Python, SQL, C, R
A photo of Scott Henderson
Scott Henderson

Scott Henderson, scottyh@uw.edu

  • Python
  • Satellite imagery
  • Geospatial raster and vector data
  • Amazon Web Services, Kubernetes
  • Jupyter Notebooks, Pangeo JupyterHubs
Scott Henderson

Bernease Herman, bernease@uw.edu

  • Python, R, Scala
  • Machine learning
  • Interpretable models
  • Data visualization (D3.js, Leaflet, Shiny)
  • Version control (Git, GitHub)
  • Reproducibility and open science
Scott Henderson

Vaughn Iverson, vsi@uw.edu

  • Metagenomics, Genome assembly and annotation
  • C (including OpenMP)
  • Javascript / Coffeescript
  • Go (golang)
  • Shell (Bash, Awk)
  • NoSQL databases (esp. MongoDB)
  • Visualization (eg. GraphViz, d3.js)
  • Data compression
Scott Henderson

Ariel Rokem, arokem@gmail.com

  • Python
  • Git/GitHub
  • Neuroinformatics
  • Cloud computing
  • Machine learning
Scott Henderson

Valentina Staneva, vms16@uw.edu

  • R
  • Python, MATLAB
  • Statistical modeling and inference
  • Data analysis
  • Image processing and computer vision
  • Optimization
  • Reproducibility and open science
Scott Henderson

Anissa Tanweer, tanweer@uw.edu

  • Ethnography
  • Qualitative methods
  • Data science ethics
  • Human-centered data science
Scott Henderson

Spencer Wood, spwood@uw.edu

  • Ecology and conservation
  • Geospatial data and GIS
  • Statistics
  • R, Python, shell scripts
  • Data storage and databases

June Yang, jyang32@uw.edu

  • Population processes, social demography, demographic inference
  • Text mining
  • Complex survey analysis
  • Social Statistics
  • R, Python, SQL

UW Librarian Hours

UW librarians provide support for finding and accessing data, data management planning, data organization, reuse of data, data sharing and storage, data citation, instruction, literature review, publications, citation management tools, and more.

Negeen Aghassibake, negeena@uw.edu

Data Visualization Librarian

  • Data visualization: Tableau, RAWGraphs, Power BI
  • Data collection tools: REDCap, Survey Gizmo, Qualtrics
  • Data preparation and cleaning: OpenRefine, Excel
  • Data management plan guidance
  • Data literacy

Elizabeth Bedford, ebedford@uw.edu

Data Services Projects Librarian

  • Data management plans
  • Data curation, sharing and archiving
  • Persistent identifier assignment
  • Navigating funder mandates
  • ResearchWorks Archive

Jenny Muilenburg, jmuil@uw.edu

Data Librarian

  • Data management plan guidance
  • Data citation
  • Data curation and archiving
  • Data repositories

Trisha Prasant, uwtextmine@uw.edu

Text Mining Student Assistant

Available by appointment to all currently enrolled UW students, faculty, and staff.


Research Computing Hours

Office hours are offered to help researchers, UW IT professionals and students learn about options and opportunities in research computing. We can review UW-native systems such as Hyak, cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and the Google Cloud Platform, and national resources such as the XSEDE grid computing platform.

We are available to discuss cost, grant opportunities, data security, collaboration tools, system architecture and the array of tools, technologies, solutions and platforms available to help you focus on your research rather than on building or reinventing computing infrastructure. We can also help you connect with other research teams in the UW community with similar interests and experiences. Our first priority is to determine what you are working on and where your issues and challenges lie towards helping you find best solutions.

Naomi Alterman, naomila@uw.edu

  • Education and pedagogy
  • Cloud computing
  • Software engineering
  • Containerization, Docker
  • UNIX, shell scripting
  • IoT, embedded systems
  • Python, R, C/C++, Javascript
  • Databases, SQL, NoSQL

Rob Fatland, rob5@uw.edu

  • Networking: Finding resources, collaborators, help
  • Data science design patterns
  • Data visualization
  • Geophysics, emphasis on hydrosphere
  • Remote sensing
  • Embedded systems / IOT / ruggedizing
  • Translating from research to public utility
  • STEM education and public outreach

Kristen Finch, finchkn@uw.edu

  • High-performance computing (HPC)
  • Containers and containerization
  • Simple Linux Utility Resource Manager (SLURM) for HPC

Nam Pho, npho@uw.edu

  • High-performance computing (HPC)
  • Reproducibility and open science
  • Programming: R, Python

Xiao Zhu, xiaozhu@uw.edu

  • High-performance computing (HPC)
  • Performance optimization of HPC applications
  • Parallel programming (e.g. MPI, OpenMP, CUDA, SYCL)

Amazon Web Services

Joel Morgan, universityofwashington@amazon.com
(Senior Solutions Architect)

Third Tuesday of every month, 1-2 PM in the WRF Data Science Studio

Ask an AWS Architect: Come to AWS office hours with your code, architecture diagrams, and your AWS questions at the ready! You will have access to deep technical expertise and will be able to get guidance on AWS architecture, usage of specific AWS services and features, cost optimization, and more.


Google Cloud Platform

Charlie Engelke, cloud-office-hours-uw@google.com

Data Services Projects Librarian

  • Google Cloud Platform
  • Serverless Software
  • Python
  • Software Architecture

Emma Haruka Iwao, cloud-office-hours-uw@google.com

  • Google Cloud Platform
  • High-performance computing (HPC)
  • C, C++
  • DevOps and site reliability engineering

UW-IT EIIA – Tableau & Analytics

The Enterprise Information Integration and Analytics (EIIA) team is able to provide information and support for Tableau and UW’s enterprise data offerings. Please come talk to us if you have questions about:

Tableau: Licensing, Use cases, Technical issues
Enterprise Information Integration and Analytics: What’s available? How do I get access? What tools can I connect with?

Nina Velikin, nvel@uw.edu

System Analyst, IM Data Delivery Group

  • Tableau
  • Business Intelligence
  • UW Enterprise Data

Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences (CSSS) Statistical Consulting

CSSS provides free statistical consulting to current UW faculty, staff, and students in affiliated departments. Our consultants offer guidance at any stage of a project from study design and planning through the selection statistical methods to the interpretation of model results. However, we recommend involving a statistician at the earliest stage possible, as this ensures the best scientific foundation for statistical analyses. Please note that CSSS consultants do not generally provide statistical software support nor do consultants run analyses for consulting clients. Services include:

  • Planning analyses and building hypotheses to test
  • Regression modeling for continuous, discrete, and categorical outcomes
  • Regression modeling for dependent and independent data
  • Survey design
  • Visit the CSSS website to learn more.

Please email to schedule an appointment: csss-consult@stat.washington.edu, or visit the CSSS website.

  • Planning analyses and building hypotheses to test
  • Regression modeling for continuous, discrete, and categorical outcomes
  • Regression modeling for dependent and independent data
  • Survey design

Mathworks Hours

eScience has partnered with Mathworks in order to provide students, faculty and staff support for MATLAB, Simulink and Source Control (git). MATLAB® is the high-level language and interactive environment used by millions of engineers and scientists worldwide. It lets you explore and visualize ideas and collaborate across disciplines including signal and image processing, communications, control systems, and computational finance. Simulink® is a block diagram environment for multidomain simulation and Model-Based Design. It supports simulation, automatic code generation, and continuous test and verification of embedded systems.

Please email to receive support: support@mathworks.com, or visit call 508-647-7000.