It is important for me to make a positive difference as a data scientist and leader. I am passionate about bringing both policy and analytic people with us on our advanced analytics journey. For me, a good outcome is where we all help each other to get to a better working space. I was excited to be invited to contribute to the New Zealand Women in Data Science Conference 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021. I was thrilled to have my talk be chosen as the best of Women in Data Science for New Zealand in 2021.
I’m Chief Data Scientist at the Ministry of Education. I’m still discovering what great things we can do with data for New Zealand.
I have previously run a small machine learning Ops team at Chorus. We had a data science/data engineering DevOps approach. We did everything from internal customer management and bespoke data science solutions to pipelines and production loads. I was very proud of our Airflow and KubeFlow on EKS in AWS. This year were awarded honours by AWS.
I have worked in industry and in research including teaching. Every data set has stories to tell; I have worked on many different kinds of data including customer, marketing, financial, health, biological, energy sector, water catchment, and air quality. I am often told my enthusiasm for my field is contagious. I have built my career in a variety of analysis and statistical modelling positions moving successfully between commercial and academic research projects that required data science and investigation skills.