Board
Meet our board members
Darina Chudnovskaya, MSc
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.
Board Alumni
Katerina Placek, MSc
Co-Founder and Blog Chair: Jan 2018 - July 2019
Katie Cousins, PhD
Co-Founder: Jan 2018 - July 2018
