Women in Data Science

How Improv Makes You a Better Analyst (lighting talk) by Marieke Jackson

Understanding and implementing the fundamentals of Improv comedy make you a better data scientist, coworker, and human. In this talk, we will go over the basic rules, learn how to exercise those techniques, and figure out how to incorporate them into our everyday lives.

About the Speaker: Marieke Jackson (https://www.linkedin.com/in/marieke-jackson-53941742/) is a Data Scientist at Health Union, a yoga teacher, a long-time improviser (comedy and real-life BS), and your new friend. Hailing from essentially everywhere in the United States, she enjoys creativity, reason, and pancakes.

Spark Enabled Biobank Insights: A Paradigm Shift in Genetic Evaluation of Prospective and Existing Drug Targets by Bonnie Kruft

UK Biobank is an incredible resource of over 500,000 patients worth of clinical and genomics data. The sheer amount of data can be a beast to handle and even harder to tame! Our solution: a scalable and robust pipeline using an open source framework powered by Apache Spark to enable R&D scientists at GlaxoSmithKline to look for links between DNA and health outcomes on a massive scale. Scientists are now able to systematically evaluate early drug targets for genetic evidence and incorporate this evidence at the earliest possible stage of decision making.

About the Speaker: Bonnie Kruft (https://www.linkedin.com/in/bonniekruft/)is a leader of data science and innovation projects at GlaxoSmithKline focused on developing new ways of working and solutions that will drive value to the R&D pipeline. She has a PhD in computational chemistry from the City University of New York. In her free time she loves walking with her dog, Murphy, and has a penchant for good wine and cheese!

Map/Reduce on Your Laptop by Vicki Boykis

Distributed systems are often a common go-to architectural pattern for working with large amounts of data. But how do you know if you have big data? Based on consulting work in the Hadoop and big data space, this talk will walk through how to think of your data size and analysis using:bash, Python multiprocessing, and Spark locally focusing on understanding the tradeoffs between different ways of looking at data.

About the speaker: Vicki Boykis (https://www.linkedin.com/in/vickiboykis/) is a data science consultant focusing on building robust data products across a number of industries including healthcare, education, media, and finance. When not implementing variations of MapReduce and COUNT(*), she enjoys writing about tech (http://veekaybee.github.io/) and Nutella.

A word of thanks to our supporters:

Thank you to Drexel LeBow’s Business Analytics Solutions Center (http://www.lebow.drexel.edu/faculty-and-research/centers/business-analytics-solutions-center) for hosting us and GlaxoSmithKline (https://www.gsk.com/) for sponsoring the food.

Drexel LeBow’s Business Analytics Solutions Center is a hub for collaboration between academia and industry, providing business solutions for organizations through faculty and student analytics consulting teams, thought leadership, and industry recognition.

GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) is the largest British pharmaceuticals company, setting out to become the most innovative in an industry facing many challenges. Fully embracing and driving the latest technologies is necessary to more efficiently deliver better drugs to patients. The R&D Data Centre of Excellence (CoE) was established as a catalyst for the transformation to a more data-driven organization and is happy to sponsor the Women in Data Science meetup event.