Allison Theobold

Speaker: Allison Theobold, doctoral student, Department of Mathematical Sciences, Montana State University

Date: Thursday, February 6, 2020
Time: 3:10 PM
Place: Byker Auditorium, Chemistry & Biochemistry Building
Title: Designing Data Science Workshops for Data-Intensive Scientific Research

The lecture will be followed by a reception.

Summary

Over the last 20 years, statistics preparation has become vital for a broad range of scientific fields and statistics coursework has been readily incorporated into undergraduate and graduate programs. However, a gap remains between the computational skills taught in statistics courses and those required for the use of statistics in scientific research. In this talk, Allison Theobold will describe research on the design, implementation and evaluation of a suite of data science workshops that provide environmental science graduate students with the skills necessary to retrieve, view, wrangle, visualize and analyze their data using reproducible tools. These workshops fill a gap in the environmental science and statistics curricula, supporting students with opportunities to grow in their skills for computing with data. Open to faculty, staff and the larger community, these workshops also promote continued learning of the tools necessary for working with data and provide additional resources for incorporating data science into the classroom.

Allison Theobold is the recipient of a 2019 Kopriva Graduate Fellowship.

Theobold’s lecture is presented by the Kopriva Science Seminar Series, which is funded through an endowment created by Phil Kopriva, a 1957 microbiology graduate from MSU. Kopriva, who died in 2002, also created an endowment to fund the Kopriva Graduate Fellowship Program, which provides support and opportunities for graduate students in the College of Letters and Science, particularly in the biomedical sciences. The series features seminars by MSU graduate students, faculty members and guest speakers.