Pam Fuhrmeister
I am a data analyst with over a decade of experience in analyzing many different types of data sets in both industry and scientific research contexts. I got a PhD in languages sciences in 2020, and once I left academia and started working in industry again, I was really (pleasantly) surprised at how similar my work was in the two contexts. In industry, we typically want to use data to understand customer behavior to make better business decisions, and in research, we want to use data to understand people’s behavior or responses to some type of input, usually so we can help a specific population of people. In any case, I’ve used a lot of the same skills in both contexts: thinking through problems in a logical way, rigorous data/statistical analyses, and then communicating what we’ve learned through the data in an accessible way. Even though I’m no longer a researcher, I still have my publications listed on my website because I’m proud of that work. Plus, they contain some fun statistical analyses and data visualizations. :)
I have several tools in my toolkit: For data visualization, statistical analyses, or communicating results, I prefer using R (particularly the tidyverse, lme4, and brms packages). For building automated reports or data pipelines, I typically use Python and SQL. For natural language processing and machine learning models, I like to use Python (pandas, spacy, scikit-learn).
In my free time, I like running, knitting, drinking good coffee, and going to stand-up comedy shows. I also have an extremely cute and tiny cat!