My name is Sean Wang, and I’m very much not a data scientist. In real life, I am a PhD candidate in geography at Syracuse University. My dissertation research looks at the politics of immigration and birthright citizenship policies, via a comparative ethnography between local responses to Chinese birth tourism in Hong Kong and southern California, respectively. (It’s okay- my real life is not very interesting.) In my past life, I was a demographer trained right here at UW, so I’m very excited to be back to my old stomping grounds this summer!

I’m interested in participating in the DSSG program for two main reasons: first, being from Seattle, I’m always interested in working on projects that improve equity and accessbility of my home; and second, given my relative inexperience with programming relative to other DSSG fellows, I hope to learn new technical skills to add to my existing repertoire of GIS and demography analytics. Thus, I’m very excited to be working on the one DSSG project most locally relevant to the Puget Sound region: ORCA!

My first weeks in the DSSG program have been quite hectic: between learning R at the Software Carpentry workshop (and going through Python tutorials on my own), and getting a crash course on transportation planning from our enthusiastic project lead Mark Hallenbeck, I’m just barely keeping up with all the new information! Nonetheless, I’ve enjoyed getting back into the GIS lab and already made some cool maps with preliminary ORCA data. (I wish I can post them here, but NDA…)

Expect updates about the project from our team throughout the summer. My twitter feed provides random personal updates, though be warned: there are a lot of soccer posts.