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 1,800 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 (she/her)
Karla works as Senior Data Scientist at AmeriHealth Caritas, where she builds identification and stratification solutions for different populations in the healthcare industry, and coordinates larger data science efforts. Originally from Romania, Karla completed her B.A. in psychology in Germany, her M.A. in social sciences in Chicago, and her Ph.D. in psychology/neuroscience in Philly.
Amy Goodwin Davies, PhD (she/her)
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 (she/her)
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 (she/her)
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 (she/her)
As a senior manager of Strategic Analytics at Comcast, Jessie assigns value to video programming and predicts the impact of specific content loss. She leverages R in her work for data wrangling, statistical analyses, and automating everything possible, building functions, packages and R Markdown outputs. Jessie holds a BA in Psychology and a post-grad certification in Applied Statistics from Penn State.
Cass Wilkinson Saldaña (they/he)
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:
