Shaena Montanari on the Impact of Data Science Bootcamp

Key Takeaways

my name is Shayna Monson re and I'm currently a Newton international fellow at the University of Edinburgh I'm a research fellow so this is like a postdoc position and I am a paleontologist slash kind of comparative biologist I don't just focus on fossils in general I like to tie in fossils to modern day and see how we can look at our changes in biodiversity and change as an environment kind of change over time in general and how that might be applied to to now to understand how our kind of changing world might look day to day it can be quite different on sometimes I'm in the lab so from collecting data I look at the chemical composition and bones and teeth and eggshells and hair in different parts of animals to see how that reflects the environments that they live in and the diets that they have from my perspective communicating science and that's doing social good at least in my field because it's kind of promoting awareness about Natural Resources Natural History conservation and that all this data we've been generating can be can be useful I like to you know maybe figure out how to add the ways to tell people like what we're doing using all this data like you know what is the most common dinosaur that you find in a museum collection or something like that and that's something that people the general public is interested in and I can unify you know data science methods I can figure out how to extract that information and kind of disseminate it to the public I [Music] like that I could ask questions you know right off the bat I mean you said oh you can see this I'll watch this lecture online so what's the difference so I think it you can actually talk to the instructors and talk to your classmates and see what other people are doing with big data and also like I had a question about my own data set I could ask that I can't do that to a computer you know if I'm just taking a course online I think five days it you know it might not seem like enough to the outsider like oh how could I do that but I think I mean for me I think it I don't use a lot of math in my work and I don't do a lot of programming either and I just you know I kind of used our to do some basic stats and now I figured out all these different ways that I can I can use it just in five days yeah I would definitely recommend this boot camp to nonprofit professionals just because there's again so much underutilized data out there in those fields that just having a couple people in an organization or one person knowing about that even just being aware of it like if they go back and they can do it maybe do a little bit more of themselves but if they know then maybe what to ask a consultant to do or someone to help them or like get hire someone new to help them even push it further at least they'll have an idea what to ask for yeah I think for a non-profit it would be super you know be incredibly useful to have this this bootcamp [Music]