We are the Philadelphia chapter of R-Ladies Global, a world-wide organization that promotes gender diversity in the R community and in data science more broadly. While our group name does have ‘R’ and ‘Ladies’ in the title, we welcome all individuals who share our values and follow our code of conduct and who have an interest in data science, regardless of proficiency with R.
Since our first meetup in January 2018, R-Ladies Philly has grown to a highly active, diverse and community-driven group, with:
Over 1,500 members
Informal monthly meetups that are skills-focused, free, and focused on interdisciplinary statistical and coding methods
A quarterly networking happy hour series
Real-world data analytic projects that promote group work and help local nonprofits
Collaborative engagements with other local data science groups
We are always looking for more ways to grow and for new data approaches to try! Connect with us via the R-Ladies Philly Slack, Email philly@rladies.org or better yet, come to one of our Meetup events!
Darina is a data analyst at a hospital in the Philadelphia area. She uses R to run statistical tests and build models for epidemiological studies with the goal of developing patient interventions for disease prevention. She grew up in Philadelphia. Darina joined R Ladies Philly to meet other R enthusiasts.
Karla Fettich, PhD
Karla works as Head of Algorithm Development at Orchestrall, where she leads behavioral data analytics efforts and predictive model development for healthcare IT innovation. Currently, Karla uses R to create a new product that uses machine learning and predictive analytics to serve as a companion to nurse aides in their care for the elderly. Originally from Romania, Karla completed her B.A. in social and cognitive psychology at Jacobs University Bremen in Germany, her M.A. in social sciences at the University of Chicago and her Ph.D. in psychology and neuroscience at Temple University in Philadelphia.
Amy Goodwin Davies, PhD
Amy is a Data Scientist at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia with a background in Linguistics. She completed her PhD in Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, where her research focused on the grammatical representations involved with spoken word recognition. Originally from the UK, Amy moved to Philadelphia in 2012.
Chun Su, PhD
Chun is a bioinformatics scientist at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, where she explores the influence of the molecular regulatory architecture on the genetic susceptibility for childhood diseases by analyzing genomics data. She completed her PhD in Biology at the University of Virginia, studying a family of parasitic plants that infect crops in Africa. She uses R extensively for statistical analysis and data visualization in her research. Chun joined R Ladies Philly to learn data science and socialize with local R users.
Alice Walsh, PhD
Alice is a computational biologist who works in pharmaceutical drug development and has lived in the Philadelphia area for the last ten years. She uses R to transform biomarker data from patients into useful insights that can help doctors make better decisions. Alice was inspired to start an R-Ladies chapter in Philadelphia after seeing a video of another R-Ladies meetup online.
Jessie Pluto
As a senior analyst at Comcast, Jessie tries to assign value to video programming and predict the impact of specific content loss. She leverages R in her work by building packages and R Markdown documents to automate answers to recurring business questions about video programming and networks. She also uses R in her day-to-day for modeling and data wrangling. Jessie holds a BA in Psychology, a post-grad certification in Applied Statistics from Penn State and is currently working on an MS in Data Science at Drexel.
Cass Wilkinson Saldaña
Cass (they/he) is a data educator and open source developer. They first discovered the R Ladies community while working as a data librarian with city planning students in 2018. Since then, Cass has worked as a data science educator in the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and currently writes R code as part of a data engineering team with the City of Philadelphia’s COVID Containment (COCO) unit. He is passionate about empowering diverse R users to do amazing things with R and contributing to a vibrant open source ecosystem. Cass holds a BA in Anthropology from Macalester College and a Master of Science in Information from the University of Michigan.
Board Alumni
Katerina Placek, MSc Co-Founder and Blog Chair: Jan 2018 - July 2019
Katie Cousins, PhD Co-Founder: Jan 2018 - July 2018
News
R-Ladies Philly has been featured in news and other media:
