Data Analyst

Technical Skills: Python, SQL, R, Excel, Tableau, PowerBI, Azure

Education

Psychological Science, B.A. | California State University San Marcos

Certifications

Azure Data Scientist Associate | Microsoft Certification, November 2023

Work Experience

Data Analyst @ Division of Partnership, Prevention, and Services, Washington State DCYF

• Designed and implemented data systems to support the statewide launch of new foster program, enabling precise tracking and reporting of child welfare outcomes across 8,750 licensed homes and over 4,000 foster youth.
• Streamlined data workflows, leveraging PowerBI, and Excel Power Query, reducing reporting delays and accelerating decision making processes.
• Developed strategic metrics and dynamic performance dashboards using Excel and Tableau, directly informing program improvements for foster youth placement and caregiver retention.

Case Resource Manager @ Department of Developmental Disabilities, Washington State DSHS

• Streamlined the development of Individual Service Plans (ISP) for a caseload of 70+ clients, reducing development time by 37.5% (from 8 hours to 5 hours) through effective use of data analytics and software tools.
• Achieved increase in client satisfaction through targeted service customization using data insights.

Data Analyst - Independent Contractor @ California State University San Marcos

• Optimized statistical analysis and visualizations through data analysis using SPSS, R, and Excel.
• Conducted power simulations in R for growth curve modeling and regression, ensuring statistical robustness and validity with data from 150+ participant responses.
• Organized and presented weekly reports on methodology and outcomes to improve stakeholder understanding.

Research Lab Manager @ California State University San Marcos

Culture + Intergroup Relations Lab

• Led a 14-member team across 5 research projects, collaborating with the principal investigator on project design, execution and data analysis planning.
• Automated pre-processing of 200+ survey responses, DNA genetic results and salivary analysis using R scripts, SPSS, and Excel, reducing data processing time and enhancing research output quality and reliability.
• Boosted study participation from 7 to 120+, securing $3,000 in additional funding and extending study duration.

Publications

Sasha Y. Kimel, Jonas R. Kunst, Fatih Uenal, James Sidanius, Viridiana Sanchez Alcaraz. “They are what they eat”: Negative affect evoked by other’s food practices increase blatant outgroup dehumanization (Under Review).

• Ensured methodological accuracy and clarity of analyses and visualizations (PROCESS and regression).
• Interpreted and edited statistical results, tables, and visualizations to make research findings clearer, honing skills in literature review, writing, and manuscript preparation.

Projects

Leverage Machine Learning to Create Recommendation Systems

Developed a content-based movie recommender using natural language processing that achieved a cosine similarity above 0.8, ensuring users receive highly relevant and personalized movie suggestions. Built a neural collaborative filtering model with a 0.8 RMSE, highlighting the system’s predictive performance in accurately recommending movies on predicted ratings derived from users’ historical rating behavior. View

Predictive Modeling with SciKit-Learn and TensorFlow

Implemented feature engineering strategies such as interaction terms and polynomial features to achieve a 20% reduction in Mean Squared Error across regression models to enhance precision. Leveraged the power of ensemble learning with random forest regression, achieving a 15% increase in R-squared values and significantly improving model explainability and predictive accuracy. View

Decoding Data: A Step-by-Step Guide to Exploratory Data Analysis

Authored an EDA guide for dataset of 52,000 movies using Python, Numpy, Pandas, and Sci-Kit Learn that aims to increase users’ data literacy by 25% and improve their efficiency in exploring and interpreting data patterns through descriptive and inferential statistics, correlation matrix and visualizations. View