Kevin Snyder & Raju (Rama) Rayavarapu

I love connecting people across the data science community to share what they're accomplishing with data and help others do the same through community discussions, industry meetups, and more.

Kevin received his Bachelors in biochemistry from the University of Maryland in 2008 and his PhD in neuroscience from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in 2013. He currently serves as the Associate Director of Nonclinical Informatics in the Office of New Drugs in the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research at the US FDA where he manages data science and informatics initiatives to support the pharmacology/toxicology review program. These initiatives include research efforts to develop methods to optimize the regulatory use of standardized electronic CDISC-SEND-formatted toxicology study data as well as internal informatics projects to promote the development of scientifically sound, data-driven regulatory policies. Dr. Snyder also leads an agency-wide Data Science and Software Development working group that is focused on building out the organizational infrastructure necessary to support the work of data scientists across the agency and is an active collaborator with several consortia efforts, e.g. CDISC, PHUSE, and BioCelerate, to improve the implementation and use of the SEND data standard.

Raju comes to the FDA from the great state of Pennsylvania via South Bend, IN and Memphis, TN where he did his Ph.D. and post-doctoral work. He is the lead of ODAR’s DataForward Initiative which is focused on upskilling FDA staff in data related skills and harnessing the power of the incredible existing FDA data science community to drive data literacy and the joy that comes from working with and understanding data.He loves to spend his time talking FOSS (Python/R/whatever), Natural Language Processing, artificial Intelligence (AI), and all things data science. He also spends any night he can staring into the universe with his two dogs and his telescope.