ALLISON HORST

Data Scientist Advocate

📝 Personal website: allisonhorst.com

🎨 R & data science artwork repo: github.com/allisonhorst/stats-illustrations/

🐦 Twitter: @allison_horst

Hi there! I'm a Data Scientist Advocate at Observable, working to support and learn from data scientists who want to explore, analyze, and visualize data together. I am also an artist with a background in plein air landscape oil painting - though more recently, I've been building up a library of open artwork for data science and statistics education. I love creating open educational content and resources, developing & leading data science courses and workshop, and engaging with communities to support learners and users of data science tools.

What am I up to?

• 🔭 I recently played a leadership role in implementing the new Master of Environmental Data Science degree program at UCSB!

• 🌱 One of my recent projects was the palmerpenguins R package, which I developed with Drs. Alison Presmanes Hill (Voltron Data) and Kristen B. Gorman (University of Alaska Fairbanks). The package provides a dataset, penguins with structural size measurements for three penguin species recorded by Dr. Gorman and colleagues at the Palmer Station Long Term Ecological Research site, Antarctica. The penguins data is a near drop-in replacement for Anderson's iris dataset.

• 💻 I'm working with Dr. Julien Brun to create a more expansive and versatile R data package lterdatasampler, which contains sampler datasets from each of the 28 Long Term Ecological Research Network sites, for use in environmental data science and statistics courses.

Experience

• 2022 - present: Data Scientist Advocate, ObservableHQ
• 2013 - 2022: Teaching Faculty (UC Santa Barbara)
• 2019 - 2020: Artist-in-Residence, RStudio
• 2018 - 2019: Artist-in-Residence, National Center for Ecological Analysis & Synthesis

Recognition

• 2019: Outstanding Teaching Award, UC Santa Barbara
• 2018: Outstanding Teaching Award, Bren School of Environmental Science and Management

Community

• Co-Founder, Santa Barbara R-Ladies
• Co-Founder & Organizer, UCSB TidyTuesday (2019 - 2021)

Education

• PhD (2012): Toxicity and interactions of engineering nanoparticles with environmental bacteria (UCSB)
• MS (2007): Mechanical Engineering (UCSB)
• BS (2005): Chemical Engineering (UCSB)