Women in Data Science Initiative - Regional Event

WiDS Regional Event - Saturday, May 8, 2021

10:00 - 10:10    Welcome from WiDS Riverside Ambassadors

Analisa Flores, Mariam Salloum and Phoebe Ly

10:10 - 10:35    Speaker

Wenxiu Ma, Department of Statistics, UCR
"Statistical and computational methods for analyzing chromatin spatial organization data"

Wenxiu Ma is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of California Riverside. Wenxiu received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 2012. Before joining UCR, she completed her postdoctoral training at Stanford University and University of Washington. Dr. Ma’s primary research interest is in developing computational algorithms and statistical methods to solve challenges in genomics and biological big data. Her research areas include computational biology, bioinformatics, genomics, statistical and machine learning.

11:00 - 11:10    Break  

11:10 - Noon    

Grad Student Discussion / Panel    

Shahrzad Haji Amin Shirazi, CS Grad Student (working on big data platforms)
Shahrzad Haji Amin Shirazi is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UC Riverside. She is currently working on Big Active Data which is part of Apache AsterixDB.  

Negin Entezari, CS Grad Student (working on adversarial ML)
Negin Entezari  is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UC Riverside. Her research interests are in data mining and machine learning. Her research focus is currently on adversarial Machine Learning. 

Sara Abdali, CS Grad Student (working on fake news detection)
Sara Abdali is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UC Riverside. She received an M.Sc in Artificial Intelligence from K. N. Toosi University of Technology and a BS.C. in Software Engineering from Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz. She is currently working on fake news and misinformation detection under the supervision of Prof. Papalexakis.  

Sichen Chen Statistics Grad Student (working on machine learning)
Sichen Chen is a 3rd year Ph.D.student  in the Department of Statistics at the University of California, Riverside (UCR). She earned her BS in Actuarial Science from Michigan State University, and MS in Applied Mathematics and Statistics from John Hopkins University. Her research interests are in the applications of statistics and machine learning in biology.

Samriddhi Singla Samriddhi Singla is a 4th year Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UC Riverside. Her interests lie in big spatial database systems. She is currently working on developing a system that efficiently processes the combination of large-scale raster(satellite imagery) and vector(geographical boundaries) data. 

Noon - 1:00    Lunch / UCR DS Info Session    

Joyce Fu, Data Science Undergraduate Advisor for CNAS
Mariam Salloum, Data Science Undergraduate Advisor for BCOE

1:00 - 2:00    Panel (Data Scientists)    

Jeanette Jin is a data scientist at Brex and works on proposing and evaluating credit policies and building machine learning models to assess customer risk. Prior to joining Brex, Jeanette modeled baseball batting outcomes and in-game basketball free-throws to price live micro-betting sports markets at SimpleBet. Besides her work in data science, Jeanette has been a longstanding advocate for education and has served on the National Parent Teacher Association's Board of Directors. In her freetime, she enjoys baking and binging podcasts. She holds a B.A. in Statistics from Harvard University. 

Anne Hansen is currently the manager of the data science & analytics team at Keap, a software company based in Chandler, Arizona. Previously she has worked as a statistician/data scientist in semiconductor manufacturing and in digital marketing. She has a Ph.D. in Applied Statistics from UC Riverside. She enjoys applying statistical techniques to help businesses grow and make the best decisions. She has had a very rewarding and fun career thus far. Outside of work, her twin boys who are almost five years old keep her busy.

Ashley Cacho currently works at T-Mobile as an Analyst on the Modeling and Data Science team within Credit Risk. Previously, she worked as a Data Science Statistician at Agilent Technologies where her team developed a novel DNA sequencing platform. Ashley earned her PhD in Applied Statistics, MS in Statistics, and BS in Applied Mathematics all at UCR.

Esra Kurum, Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistics, earned her Ph.D. in Statistics from the Pennsylvania State University. Before joining UCR, she was a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases at Yale University. The main focus of her research is in the area of longitudinal and survival data analyses. Specifically, she is interested in building novel models that explore trends in data that are changing over time. She has collaborated with researchers in various fields including aging, behavioral science, infectious disease, rheumatology, and stem cell biology. During these collaborations, she has developed novel statistical methods for studying vaccine impacts; change-point model detection; copula-based modeling; and joint modeling of mixed outcomes. Her research has been funded by external grants from NIH and NSF. She was the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship and the 2018 Kenneth Rothman Epidemiology Prize.

2:00 - 2:10    Break    

2:10 - 3:00    Workshop    Beginner Python/R Workshop 

Workshop Instructor - Elena Strzheletska is a lecturer at in the Department of Computer Science and Statistics at UC Riverside. She received her PhD from UCR in 2018. Her research interests lie in the area of algorithms and data mining. Her current research focuses on developing and implementing algorithms for large spatial, spatiotemporal and evolving datasets. She teaching several Computer Science / Data Science courses at UCR, specifically CS 105 - Data Analysis Methods that provides an introduction to the data science project life-cycle. 

3:10 - 4:00    Workshop    Intermediate Python/R Workshop

Workshop Instructor - Kim Phan is a graduate student in the Department of Statistics at the University of California, Riverside. She also received her undergraduate degree majoring in Statistics from UCR. Her interests include survival data analysis and its application in clinical trials. Kim especially enjoys being involved with the Highlander Statistics Society by mentoring students as well as participating in the Statistics Graduate Student Association.

4:00 - 4:10    Closing Remarks