My name is Jacob Rich. I am currently a rising senior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where I study mathematics, statistics, and economics. I work with a professor studying respondent-driven sampling and network clustering. I will be applying to graduate school this upcoming fall to pursue a Masters in statistics.

I’m coming to DSSG after finishing the fourth year of my program in Political Science at Penn State. My dissertation is focused on state–sponsored death squads in El Salvador and South Africa. I use Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to extract information from Truth and Reconciliation testimony in order to analyze the organization of death squads. The social sciences often has a breadth of qualitative, textual evidence, but a dearth of high quality data, so I am bullish on the contribution that information extraction techniques, such as the ones I use for my disseration, can have in studying social phenomena.

I am a PhD candidate in Government at the University of Texas at Austin. Most of my work involves applying statistical NLP tools to study formal legal texts (e.g. national constitutions or ordinary legislation). I am affiliated with the Comparative Constitutions Project, and I helped to build Constitute.

Hello there everyone! My name is Brett Bejcek and I am a recent graduate of the Computational Data Analytics program at The Ohio State University. With past research experiences at The Cleveland Clinic, The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. (JPMC), and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), I am experienced with real world applications of big data. 

My name is Wenhao Zhang and you might also know me as Wenonah. I am an undergraduate at Claremont McKenna College studying Economics and Applied Mathematics with some emphasis on Computer Science. As a rising senior, I have dedicated myself to Lowe Institute of Political Economy, where I investigated the labor market condition in both Inland Empire and Coachella Valley and produced comprehensive economic and demographic annual reports.

I grew up in suburban Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and spent the bulk of my early life doing sporty things and exploring the outdoors. I was fortunate to have two teachers for parents, which meant we all got summers off to travel around. By 19, I had set foot in all 50 U.S. states and canoed or backpacked in most.

Hi world! I’m a first year master student in Human Centered Design & Engineering here at UW. Generally I’m interested in leveraging technology to design products than enhance human abilities. Coming from a mixed background in Industrial Engineering and Human-centered Design, I’m also interested in designing systems that offer people a better environment to work and live.
I’m very excited to be part of the Equity Modeler team in the DSSG program this summer. Always fascinated by the charm of cities, I’m hoping to build this tool that can help Seattle become a better place for all of us.

I’m a masters student at the University of Washington’s iSchool, studying information management with emphases on information architecture and information systems design. I also did most of my undergraduate work at UW, majoring in economics with minors in applied math and geography.

Hello! I am a PhD student in Quantitative Psychology at UNC Chapel Hill. My research focuses on time series data, particularly, solutions for problems that arise in daily survey data. My current work deals with creating a method for detecting low variability in daily survey data and determining when low variability will influence inferential statistics.

My name is Orysya Stus. I am a current Data Science and Engineering Master’s Candidate at the University of California, San Diego. My current research project includes exploring ethical issues as well as measuring success among medical-related campaigns scraped from GoFundMe. My current professional work includes integrating business intelligence, data visualizations, and data science applications within the marketing space. My data science stack includes python, SQL, Tableau, Spark, and machine learning.

Hi, I am a graduate student at the University of Washington, Seattle, studying Transportation Engineering. Most of my work involves dealing with big data in Transportation and Traffic Engineering and use different machine and deep learning tools to convert this data into valuable information. I also work on the algorithmic side of connected and autonomous vehicle related research.

With the DSSG, I will be a part of the ORCA team and will be working with the ORCA electronic smart card data to understand the transfer related patterns and the statistical bias in this data.

I am veterinarian, ecologist, and currently a PhD candidate at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia, studying the intersections of wildlife health, behavior, and conservation. I specifically work with one of the most adorable (yet spazzy) marsupials you’ve never heard of - the critically endangered woylie (a.k.a. brush-tailed bettong). I am very excited to be at the UW eScience Institute this summer, surrounded by a bevy of enthusiastic, knowledgeable, and dedicated colleagues and mentors.

Hello, my name is Hillary Dawkins and I recently finished my Masters in physics at the University of Waterloo. My research focus was in quantum information and particularly fault-tolerant computation schemes and noise characterization. We used simulations of quantum systems to develop new fault-tolerant protocols. I also have an interest in physics education research, and recently spent some time working at the Open University in the UK with a physics education group. We studied the impact of question structure on student performance and demographic gaps in attainment.

I’m very excited to be a part of the DSSG program this summer on the Visualizing Equity team. Our goal is to build a tool which will help the public, urban planners, and community leaders better understand the distribution of resources throughout Seattle.

My name is Daniel Dylewsky and I am a PhD candidate in physics and applied mathematics at the University of Washington. I grew up in Massachusetts and completed my undergraduate degree in physics at Georgetown University. My research involves data-driven analysis of complex dynamical systems. Recently I have been focusing on developing simulation-based models to describe the onset of instabilities in power grids.