cv

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General Information

Full Name Collin J Schwantes
Languages English, Spanish, R, Javascript, Python

Experience

  • 2021-2024
    Data Librarian
    EcoHealth Alliance, New York, NY
    • Build and support the culture, infrastructure, skills, and strategies necessary to have collaborative, reproducible, and open science be the norm at EcoHealth Alliance.
    • Lead the transformation of data management by developing strategic plans, emphasizing flexible planning at the project level, and creating integrated and collaborative systems that unify laboratory, field, and qualitative data streams across multiple international institutions in different resource settings.
    • Write software in R (90%), Javascript (8%), and Python (2%) to facilitate open research.
    • Create, curate, and teach a collection of materials on cutting edge research reproducibility tools and FAIR/CARE practices.
    • Streamline, integrate, and maintain organizational data that capture and disseminate institutional knowledge.
    • Provide on-demand technical support across multiple projects for software testing, automated data curation, data integration, data imputation, geospatial analyses, and graph analytics.
  • 2019-2021
    Data Scientist
    Accenture Federal Services, Washington, DC
    • Rapidly develop and deploy data science applications to solve analytics problems for the United States government.
    • Data Science Craft lead. Help data scientists within the Discovery Lab thrive by connecting them with resources, building best practices, and creating a supportive development community.
    • Lead COVID-19 modeling efforts. Develop and deploy near real time forecasting models, phase classification algorithms based on CDC guidance, and a network based COVID-19 office simulation. These products provided essential information via cloud based solutions to leadership at three major government agencies and two fortune 500 companies.
    • Data visualization expert who uses human centered design techniques to generate insightful and ergonomic tools for exploring data.
    • Developed an R-python hybrid application to improve search results and usability of contracting documents with completeness and quality issues. The application uses a semantic search based on the BERT algorithm and a graph database to overcome the inconsistencies in the underlying documents.
    • Lead Graph Analytics Community of Interest. Build and nurture expertise in graph analytics and semantic data with colleagues across Accenture Federal Services, leading directly to business applications of advanced graph analytics methods.
  • 2016-2021
    Biosurveillance Scientist
    Accenture Federal Services, Washington, DC
    • Integrate open source health surveillance data from multiple jurisdictions to provide situational awareness for emerging infectious diseases in animals, plants, and people.
    • Champion reproducible research best practices.
    • Lead geospatial analysis efforts, train team members to use GIS systems, and provide subject matter expertise on geospatial data standards to ensure interoperability of systems developed by the client.
    • Write flexible programs in R to parse unstructured or semi-structured text and image based data for use in analyses. This improves reproducibility of analyses, facilitates data sharing, and reduces person hours dedicated to data entry.
    • Produce data visualizations used in in-depth reports, communications materials, and congressional/leadership briefings.
    • Test prototype applications in multiple spaces including epidemiological forecasting and natural language processing of medical text.
  • 2015-2018
    Application Developer
    Free-lance, Washington, DC
    • Developed web-based interactive graphical user interface for vector control optimization models with clients at the University of Maryland using R Shiny.
    • Developed an interactive Hymenoptera taxonomy learning tool that leverages the the Hymenoptera Anatomy Ontology.
    • Developed python applications for automating image processing tasks for the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History Entomology Department. These significantly reduced transcription error rates and the processing time per-specimen.
  • 2015
    GIS Specialist and Spatial Analyst
    University of Colorado-Boulder
    • Developed and began implementation of an open research plan for a multi-year citizen science project using open databases, R, and GitHub to transparently study the relationship between urban land-use and bee diversity in the Front Range of Colorado.
    • Created a web application that allows 500+ citizen scientists and interested members of the public to explore bee diversity data.

Education

  • 2015
    Master's Degree in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
    University of Colorado-Boulder
    • Studied the impacts of Biofuel policy on native bee species using methods from community and landscape ecology
    • Investigated foraging behaviors of native bee species in an experimental garden.
    • https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/graduate_thesis_or_dissertations/q524jp117
  • 2011
    Bachelor of Science
    University of Wisconsin-Madison
    • Majored in Zoology, Evolutionary Biology, and Spanish

Academic Interests

  • Semantic Data representations
    • Understanding applications and building tools that increase adoption
    • Use of graph theory in search and data data modeling
  • Open Science Best practices
    • Building tools and guidance to facilitate FAIR data and code
  • One Health and Emerging infectious disease
    • Modeling ecological processes that impact disease emergence and spread
  • Community Ecology
    • Modeling ecological processes that impact the assemblage of species in an area.

Other Interests

  • Hobbies: Trail Running, Mountain Biking, Backcountry Snowboarding, Cooking, Gardening, Traveling, Sci-Fi, and Print Making.