What do bioinformatics and baseball have in common? Data science!

No two data scientists are the same. One data scientist may do drastically different work from another. On Thursday, March 15, from 5:30-6:30 p.m. in the D. H. Hill Jr. Library Fishbowl Forum, an interdisciplinary panel of “Women in Data Science” discusses the skills needed in this growing specialty and describes how data science is manifested in different disciplines.

The event is free and open to the public; registration is requested at: http://go.ncsu.edu/women-in-data-science-panel

In addition to the panel, the WiDS Raleigh @ NC State event will consist of a delayed broadcast of some of the talks from the WiDS Stanford Annual Conference from 12-5 p.m. Attendees may attend any or all portions of the broadcast—this part of the day will be "drop-in."

“Our panelists have experienced an overlap of data science with science policy, visualization and design, geospatial analytics, toxicogenomics, collection management, text mining, and baseball!” says graduate student Maria E. Adonay of NC State’s Bioinformatics Research Center. Adonay organized the panel discussion.

Panelists include:

• Dr. Alyson G. Wilson, Professor, Department of Statistics, NC State
• Heidi Tebbe, Collections & Research Librarian for Engineering and Data Science, NCSU Libraries
• Dr. Laura Tateosian, Research Assistant Professor, NC State Center for Geospatial Analytics
• Dr. ClarLynda Williams-DeVane, Assistant Professor, NC Central Department of Biological and Biomedical Sciences
• Heather Goodykoontz, Analytical Consultant, SAS

The panel will be moderated by Dr. Susanne Kjemtrup-Lovelace, Adjunct Faculty of the NC State Department of Plant and Microbial Biology and member of the Research Triangle Chapter of Graduate Women in Science.

“[Interdisciplinarity] is one of the themes that we would like to draw out during the panel discussion,” Adonay notes. “And while the specific questions that each data scientist is trying to answer may seem unrelated, one thing that connects all data scientists is that they must gather, manage, and extract meaningful information from data.”

“Encouraging women to pursue and actively participate in data science is a challenge,” Adonay continued. “To overcome this challenge, as well as many others, some organizations have created opportunities for women to engage with a supportive community and to grow themselves as data scientists. We have asked our panelists to provide information on any of these types of opportunities at the discussion, as well.”