R-Ladies NYC is part of a world-wide organization to promote gender diversity in the R community.
We aspire to encourage and support women and gender minorities interested in learning and sharing their experiences in R programming by hosting a variety of events including talks, workshops, book clubs, data dives, and socials.
For more information about R-Ladies Global, visit rladies.org.
R-Ladies is dedicated to providing a harassment-free experience for everyone. We do not tolerate harassment of participants in any form. We follow the R-Ladies Global code of conduct.
See our Meetup Page for the most up-to-date info about our upcoming events!
Dorota (she/her) is a data analyst with a passion for programming, automating repetitive tasks, and workflow efficiency. She has a masters in applied statistics from NYU and currently works at MDRC, a nonprofit policy research organization. She loves fries, dogs, and going to the cinema.
Kristen Akey (she/her) is a Data Analyst at Civitech, where she helps build tools to increase civic participation. She graduated with a master’s degree from Columbia University in Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences and received her BA from Barnard College in Political Science. She has previously worked on projects related to political redistricting, campaign finance, and NYC buildings. In her free time, she enjoys biking, rollerblading, and playing fetch with her cat, Sybil.
Mei Guan(she/her/hers) is an Analytics Director at TNTP where she focuses her research on topics related to social and economic mobility for young people. Previously, Mei has worked as high school science teacher in Brooklyn and as a data analyst at the New York City Department of Education. She holds a B.S. in Biology from Cornell University and a M.S. in Applied Urban Science and Informatics from New York University.
Clara (she/her/hers) is a data scientist currently working on cloud resource usage analytics. Previously, she worked on analyzing China’s tech industry at the media publication, Protocol, and she also worked on campaigns doing political analytics. She loves making data visualizations, biking around NYC, and learning new things.
Jacki (she/hers) is a co-founder and CTO at a start-up company called Generable, which uses biologically-inspired Bayesian models to estimate treatment effects for oncology drugs from small-sample clinical data. She has over 10 years of experience in R, is an experienced Python developer, and is either author of or contributor to several open-source packages. She is passionate about improving oncology through Bayesian analysis and bioinformatics.
Nicole (she/her) is a Scientific Software Engineer at The Child Mind Institute, where she helps build software and data analysis pipelines to support research that studies children’s mental health. As a Developmental Research Psychologist by training, she previously spent 10 years in academia using social networks to explore how children’s social experience relates to their social cognitive development. She holds a Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from The University of Chicago and a B.A. in Psychology and Cognitive Science from Northwestern University. She loves all things R, data, long distance running, and cuddling with her senior rescue pup.
Anni (she/her) is a bioinformatics assistant at Rockefeller University, where she helps maintain and update analytical pipelines, with passion in exploring patterns in patients’ NGS omics data. She graduated with a master’s degree in Biostatistics and Data Science from Cornell University. Previously, she contributed to projects on RNA-seq tool development and healthcare data analysis, and also worked on mutation characteristics in patients with infectious diseases. Outside of work, she enjoys walking around NYC, reading books, and picking up new programming tips.
Dana (she/her) is a data manager with a love of coding, collaboring with others, and diving into the weeds. She has a masters in economics from BU and has over 8 years experience in people analytics. She has previously worked for companies on projects related to modeling differences in employee outcomes - such as equity in pay and promotions - by gender and race/ethnicity. She loves pierogies, taking her dog to see his friends at the dog park, and going to live concerts.
To ensure that our Meetups are accessible for all members of our community, we ask you to please review and implement the below presentation recommendations. Let us know if you have any questions.
Please email your slides to nyc@rladies.org by noon the day before your talk, or provide the link where you have them available online. It is fine if they represent a draft at this point, although let us know that – in the event that someone requests the slides ahead of the Meetup for accessibility reasons, we’d like to be able to share them.
Presentation Preparation * Slides created via R Markdown are more accessible (see Accessible R Markdown Documents) for people using screen reading software and therefore preferred over PowerPoint, PDF, and Google Slides. If you must use one of the latter, please take advantage of the accessibility features and accompany all slides with presenter notes and image alt text descriptions (see here).
Please add alternative text to your graphics, images, memes, and screenshots, in which you describe a graphic’s essential features in detail. For more information about writing alt text descriptions, see How to Create Alternative Text for Images for Accessibility and SEO and New in knitr: Improved accessibility with image alt text.
Use color schemes that are colorblind friendly (see for example the viridis and RColorBrewer packages for palettes, and colorBlindness and colorblindr for simulation of colorblindness in figures to check them).
Use a large sans serif font (minimum 22 point) on slides, and resize pictures to ensure they can be seen from smaller screens.
Presentation Tips * As best as possible, please present your talk in a quiet, well-lit environment.
Avoid vague wording like “here” or “this” that can’t be interpreted without seeing gestures.
If presenting a code demonstration, explicitly share where you are in the script (e.g. line number) when working through it. If you deviate from the prepared materials, please articulate exactly what is being changed in your code so the audience can follow along. Schedule breaks during long workshops/presentations (maybe in the middle)
Care needs to be taken with animations and things that flash, which can cause seizures and migraines (see here)
Additional Information If you are interested in learning more about accessibility for technical online presentations, the useR! 2021 blog on “Preparing for an Accessible Online Conference” has advice/considerations.
Credit Liz Hare is a quantitative geneticist focusing on working dog behavior, health, and welfare. As a blind R user, she works to improve the inclusivity of conferences, software, documentation, and training with Forwards and MiR.
Interested in giving a talk for R-Ladies NYC? Please fill out this form with your talk information.
Connect with us on slack! Please fill out this Google form to receive an invitation.
Would you like to support R-Ladies NYC? You can make a tax-free donation to our chapter via Open Collective.