Who we are

Chaya Stern, Course Director

Chaya is a TPCB graduate student in the Chodera lab working on computational molecular models used in drug discovery. The NumFocus education initiative and this course was born out of the memory of her frustration trying to fill the gaps in software development and methodology early on in graduate school. Her hope is that courses like this will make it easier for scientists to implement good software practices.
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Reshama Shaike, GitHub and version control

Reshama Shaikh is a freelance data scientist/statistician in New York City. She worked for over 10 years as a biostatistician in the pharmaceutical industry. She is an organizer of the meetup groups NYC Women in Machine Learning & Data Science and PyLadies. She received her M.S. in statistics from Rutgers University and her M.B.A. from NYU Stern School of Business.
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April Clyburne-Sherin, Data Management

April is an epidemiologist, methodologist and expert in open science tools, methods, training and community stewardship. She holds an MS in Population Medicine (Epidemiology). Since 2014, she has focused on creating curriculum and running workshops for scientists in open and reproducible research methods and is co-author of FOSTER’s Open Science Training Handbook. She is currently the Director of Scientific Outreach for the reproducibility platform Code Ocean.

Daniel Smith, Clean code and Documentation

Daniel is a Software Scientist at the Molecular Sciences Software Institute, a nexus for science, education, and cooperation serving the worldwide community of computational molecular scientists. He traditionally writes software for open-source, high-performance quantum chemistry, but has recently begun to develop community-scale quantum chemistry databases for machine learning, biomolecular forcefield fitting, and novel method accuracy assessment.

Christopher J. Wright, Package Management

Christopher grew up in Rockville Centre, New York. He attended Brown University where he earned a BS with honors in Chemical Physics. He worked with Prof. Shouheng Sun on electrochemical CO2 reduction and the structural dynamics of nanoparticles. After working at Brookhaven National Laboratory as a summer intern, he attended the University of South Carolina, working with Prof. Xiao-Dong Zhou on the atomic structure of solid oxide fuel cell components and earned a masters in Chemical Engineering. He joined the Billinge Group in 2016 and is currently working on analysis pipelines, data processing techniques and simulation software for PDF. Christopher is also a core developer for the conda-forge packaging ecosystem, president of Columbia qSTEM and sits on the Columbia Foundations for Research Computing advisory board. In his free time Christopher develops for open source projects, plays woodwind instruments, enjoys good scotch and works out by playing squash.

Jane Adams, Testing

Jane Adams is a Data Scientist at Two Sigma Investments where she leads data quality strategy for Data Engineering, and she is the co -creator and -maintainer of marbles, an open-source Python testing library that gives your tests beautiful failure messages. She holds an undergraduate degree from NYU in Complex Systems, and a masters degree from NYU in Urban Data Science. Throughout her career, she has worked on both data science and engineering teams, and is always looking for new ways to share skills (or steal ideas) and improve communication across disciplines. She has traveled around the world to talk about topics ranging from how ants find your picnic basket to how to not accidentally hurt people with data. You can watch her talk about unit testing data at PyData Amsterdam here