Meet Sara Stoudt, an Assistant Professor in the Mathematics department at Bucknell University (Go Bison!). She is interested in ecology applications and teaching students how to write about statistics and communicate with data more generally. She is also the newly elected member of the ASA Statistics and Data Science Education team and serves as a member of the communications team working with Chelsea Parlett-Pelleriti to spread the word about all of the great stuff section members are doing.
Why did you decide to go into Statistics/Statistics Education?
The short answer is that I am nosey, so that quote about statisticians being able to "play in everyone's backyard" resonates with me. My real origin story is that the summer after my sophomore year in college I had an internship at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. I had taken AP Stats and one college-level stats class before that internship, but the project I worked on had real impact that I could immediately see. That hooked me. If I could do something like that with just a baseline knowledge of statistics, what could I do if I learned more?
What Statistics Topic do you think is the most difficult to teach well?
The "art" part of statistics: how you make judgment calls and decisions about the data and analysis along the way to an answer. I've tried to take a storytelling approach where I narrate my own thought processes, but it can be challenging to unpack my own "gut feelings" or intuition about a problem.
What is your go-to source for data?
Every time the Data is Plural newsletter (https://www.data-is-plural.com/) hits my inbox, I bookmark at least one dataset to try out in class. It's a treasure trove of out of the box datasets.
When she is not reading, writing (non-academically), and listening to music you can connect with Sara on Twitter (@sastoudt).
Meet Chelsea Parlett-Pelleriti , she’s an Instructional Assistant Professor in the School of Engineering at Chapman University. Her life passion is to get people excited about (or at least less scared of) statistics and data science. She currently teaches many Data Science, Machine Learning, and Computer Science courses to undergraduate students. When she’s not teaching, she serves the SDSE Section as a member of the communications team, to help Sara Stoudt share updates and content relevant to teaching Statistics and Data Science. She also does a lot of science communication (#scicomm) on Twitter, TikTok, YouTube and LinkedIn to help make difficult Data Science concepts approachable via memes, graphics, and open source lecture materials!
Why did you decide to go into Statistics/Statistics Education?
I fell in love with statistics when I took an advanced methods course in preparation to apply to Clinical Psychology PhD programs. My professor's love of statistics was contagious, and to be completely honest, I realized that I enjoyed and was good at something (stats) that other people truly hated. So I had an opportunity to either convince them to love statistics as well, or they'd pay me a lot of money to do their statistics for them! In grad school, I fell in love with teaching and realized that I love creating activities, graphics, and memes that helped students get a more intuitive understanding of how statistics and data science concepts really work. I want to empower students (and others!) to do their own statistics/data science WELL, rather than trying to force rote and inflexible methods to fit the exciting questions they want to answer with data.
What Statistics Topic do you think is the most difficult to teach well?
Uncertainty. People like "correct" answers, and statistics often doesn't have those. Getting people used to uncertainty in their answers is a tough sell.
What is your go-to source for data?
The Tidy Tuesday GitHub! https://github.com/rfordatascience/tidytuesday. I also sometimes generate synthetic data (using the synthpop package) based on real studies from OSF for class examples!
When she’s not reading thriller books, watching Bob's Burgers, or playing with her corgi puppy Nova (yes, named after an ANOVA) you can find Chelsea on Twitter (@chelseaparlett), TikTok (@chelseaparlettpelleriti), Github, and LinkedIn.
We’d love to meet you!
Do you know a member who we should meet? Nominate them using this form!
Comments