JupyterCon 2020 keynote speaker announcement

Lucy is an assistant professor of statistics at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. She previously was a postdoctoral fellow at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where she worked with Prof. Jeffrey Leek. Before starting her PhD in biostatistics at Vanderbilt University, Lucy worked as a statistical data analyst at the Washington University School of Medicine.

A co-founder of R-Ladies Nashville, creator of online courses, and developer of several R packages, Lucy is an avid organizer, communicator and member of the R community. In her blog, she writes about statistics in medicine, using and teaching R, and her experience as an early career academic. She co-hosts the Casual Inference podcast with Ellie Murray from Boston University, where they talk about statistics, data science and epidemiology.

Lucy and her colleagues at Wake Forest are embracing the challenge of teaching during a pandemic, showing both creativity and collegiality with peer-to-peer communities for learning how to teach online. In the photo above you see her with her self-made light board for preparing class videos. She teaches statistical modeling and statistical learning, and I can’t wait to watch her videos — I see a rising star in the open education sphere.

She does research in causal inference, observational study methods, and applications of statistics in medicine. In one recent study she collaborated on, the team looked at the risk of opioid therapy for veterans with rheumatoid arthritis and mental health concerns. Another looks at the effectiveness of dressings with collagen on wounds that resist healing. The common thread is applying a deep understanding of statistics to hard problems in health care. It seems today more than ever we need researchers with this focus. To Lucy, “medicine is a data science.”

In her latest project, the team developed a mathematical model to analyze the impact of test-trace-isolate programs on the dynamics of infectious transmission. She then built an application based on this model, ConTESSA (Contact Tracing Evaluation and Strategic Support Application), to support managers of contact-tracing programs. Lucy and her collaborators also created a MOOC to teach about the indicators of performance of a contact-tracing program, how to use the ConTESSA tool to estimate the effect of these indicators on transmission, and how to strategize to increase the impact of the overall program. The MOOC is free on Coursera, and starts today.

In these troubled times of weaponized misinformation, and a global health crisis on a polarized and deeply unequal societal backdrop, the world needs charismatic science communicators like Lucy. Her system for effective statistical communication, shared in her recent talkat the Joint Statistical Meeting (JSM), should be in every student’s curriculum. She teaches us all to be mindful of the audience, adapt our content, and convey data-powered messages so they are both interesting and true.