ALLISON HORST

Senior Developer Marketing Manager

📝 Personal website: allisonhorst.github.io

🎨 R & data science artwork website: www.allisonhorst.com

Hi there! I'm a Senior Developer Marketing Manager at Observable, working as part of our Developer Relations team to support and learn from data scientists who want to access, explore, analyze, and visualize data together. I am also an artist with a background in plein air landscape oil painting - though more recently, I've been building up a library of open artwork for data science. I love creating educational content and resources, developing & leading data science courses and workshops, and engaging with communities to support anyone who can benefit from better data science workflows, tools, and collaboration.

What am I up to?

• I love making educational content that helps people feel victorious as they learn something new! Here are a few examples of what I've been making at Observable:
  • An overview video that introduces Observable Framework for building custom dashboards with code!
  • A short introductory video (featuring yours truly!) to help folks build their first data app with Framework
  • A blog post on why data loaders are awesome for speedy data apps (bonus: here's another one on how to write and troubleshoot data loaders in Framework data apps)
  • An interactive tutorial on building choropleth maps in Observable Plot
  • ...and one more that aims to help R data scientists make an easy jump into data viz with JavaScript using Observable Plot: Plot from ggplot2
  • A recent creator feature that I just loved prepping and writing: Ben Welsh nerds out about building better data pipelines for data journalism
  • My full course on introductory data wrangling and analysis in JavaScript!

And here are some other projects I've worked on:

• 🌱 I'm still flying high on the global adoption of the palmerpenguins R package, which I developed with Drs. Alison Presmanes Hill (Anaconda, Inc.) and Kristen B. Gorman (University of Alaska Fairbanks). The package provides a dataset, penguins with structural size measurements for three penguin species recorded by Dr. Gorman and colleagues at the Palmer Station Long Term Ecological Research site, Antarctica. The penguins data is a near drop-in replacement for Anderson's iris dataset, and has been adopted in data science tools, languages and platforms around the world. We even wrote a paper about it, check it out!

• 💻 With Dr. Julien Brun I created a more expansive and versatile R data package lterdatasampler, which contains sampler datasets from each of the 28 Long Term Ecological Research Network sites, for use in environmental data science and statistics courses.

• 🔎 Here's an interactive tutorial I built to help people become missing explorers — only when it comes to exploring missing data, of course!

• And if you want to learn more about missing data, I co-authored The Missing Book with the wonderful Dr. Nick Tierney!

Experience

• Sep 2024 - Present: Senior Developer Marketing Manage, ObservableHQ
• Jan 2023 - Sep 2024: Developer Marketing Manager, ObservableHQ
• 2022 - 2023: Data Scientist Advocate, ObservableHQ
• 2013 - 2022: Teaching Faculty (UC Santa Barbara)
• 2019 - 2020: Artist-in-Residence, RStudio
• 2018 - 2019: Artist-in-Residence, National Center for Ecological Analysis & Synthesis

Recognition

• 2019: Outstanding Teaching Award, UC Santa Barbara
• 2018: Outstanding Teaching Award, Bren School of Environmental Science and Management

Community

• Co-Founder, Santa Barbara R-Ladies
• Co-Founder & Organizer, UCSB TidyTuesday (2019 - 2021)

Education

• PhD (2012): Toxicity and interactions of engineering nanoparticles with environmental bacteria (UCSB)
• MS (2007): Mechanical Engineering (UCSB)
• BS (2005): Chemical Engineering (UCSB)