I am an educator, researcher, data scientist, and writer. I am currently an Education Data Specialist for Chesterfield County Public Schools, where I use data to help guide decisions and improve students’ educational experiences. In my free time, I enjoy reading, writing, data visualization/analysis, going to the gym, and spending time with friends & family (including my pup, Nala).
I earned my PhD in educational psychology from the VCU School of Education in July 2019, where I worked in the Motivation and Self-Regulation Lab and in the Cognition and Learning Lab to study students’ motivation, behaviors, and achievement. In my dissertation, I studied how writers’ daily emotional states (think: anxiety, enjoyment, boredom) influenced their productivity as well as the day-to-day inertia of these emotional states.
During grad school, I discovered a love for working with data – exploring, visualizing, modeling, and communicating. I mostly work in R, and am proficient in the usual packages that folks use for data analysis, visualization, and modeling (e.g. the {tidyverse} and {tidymodels} suites), plus some more specialized packages. I really enjoy discovering new R packages and learning new things that R can do. I’m (very slowly) learning to code in python – there’s not much free time with an infant in the house – and hope to find time to pick up other languages as well.
Resume
Professional Experience
Education Data Specialist
Chesterfield County Public Schools
(January 2020 - present)
Associate Director of Early Childhood Data and Analytics
Virginia Department of Education
(April 2019 - December 2020)
Affiliate Research Faculty
VCU School of Education
(July 2019 - present)
Graduate Research Assistant
VCU School of Education
(August 2016 - April 2019)
English Language Arts Teacher
Chesterfield County Public Schools
(November 2012 - June 2016)
Education
PhD in Educational Psychology (2019)
Virginia Commonwealth University
Advisor: Sharon Zumbrunn
Dissertation: Investigating Daily Writing Emotions, Attention Regulation, and Productivity: An Intensive Longitudinal Study
MT in English Education (2012)
Virginia Commonwealth University
BA in English (2010)
Virginia Tech
Technical Skills & Tools
Programming: R, Python, SQL
Statistics/Modeling: R, Mplus, Blimp, Stata, Excel, SPSS
- Proficient in several modeling approaches/frameworks, including inferential modeling, predictive modeling, unsupervised learning, meta-analysis, text mining/analysis, and more.
- Proficient in several modeling approaches/frameworks, including inferential modeling, predictive modeling, unsupervised learning, meta-analysis, text mining/analysis, and more.
Visualization: R, Inkscape
Publications
See my list of publications on my publications page.