I'm getting geeked up about my new role at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. One part of the new job the nerd in me is particularly excited about is how to make data governance easier/better/more useful at an institutional scale. As anyone who has spent time in genomics, or really any other field that has been hit by the data...

I got an email request to write a blog post about how I go about trying to publish statistics papers in general purpose journals like Nature, Science, PNAS, etc. One recent example of such a paper is our work on the problem of post-prediction inference that appeared in PNAS. But we have a few others over the years in these journals. I'...

Whenever I need to write something - a grant, a paper, a report - and I'm stuck, I use writing "kindling" to get started. This is an example of writing "kindling". It is basically any quick thing I can dash off, where there are no consequences to the writing whatsoever. It lets me start to type words without really feeling the pressure...

Like many faculty, last summer we had to scramble to figure out how to transition what had always been an in person course to an online format. I have taught Advanced Data Science off and on for the last 8 years. While I've taught a lot of classes online, this has never been one of them! So last summer we set out to re-design the cours...

We've been running a data science training program for young people with non-traditional tech backgrounds. This training program has been highly successful in some ways - we have an over 80% completion rate on our highly technical MOOCs that cover Github, Version Control, R, Data Communication and more. The young people who complete th...

It has been a terrible year for everyone. Some people have been without jobs, or lost their lives, but even people lucky enough to have job security and their health have been dealing with being isolated, losing childcare at random times due to Covid scares, dealing with additional requirements as part of a transition to online work, a...

I've been a Hey email user for a few months now and I have to say I'm a fan. I was really excited when the team behind Hey announced that they would introduce a lightweight "blog" by just sending an email from my account to world@hey.com. I have been blogging for a while, but basically it has always been a matter of activation energy t...