Leslie Emery

Leslie Emery, PhD, is a Senior Principal Data Scientist in the Knowledge Science Research team at Bristol Myers Squibb working on research for cancer treatments. She works with a team of translational data scientists to design and deploy innovative analysis-ready data products for exploratory research. These data products include custom data transformation, visualization, & quality tracking apps in R Shiny and curated & standardized data sets for analysis. She has particular expertise in harmonizing data from many disparate sources into combined data sets that enable cross-study or cross-disease analysis. Leslie works closely with stakeholders from Informatics & Predictive Sciences and Translational Medicine to define their data and visualization requirements and deliver them in elegant and efficient ways. Her work makes it easy for scientists doing drug development research to answer their scientific questions.

Leslie completed her PhD in genome sciences at the University of Washington studying the patterns that evolution and population history have left in current human genetic variation. She then worked as a Research Scientist at UW Biostatistics on NIH consortium projects identifying the genetic variants that contribute to common human diseases. She co-led a team that designed a reproducible python + R pipeline and SQL database for harmonizing health measurement data for the TOPMed whole genome sequencing project.

Leslie's many hobbies include knitting, crochet, reading sci-fi, and tracking and analyzing her hobby data.

I'm a data science educator and community builder who wants to help you cultivate a community of practice for yourself. I talk a lot about the benefits of making genuine human connections, the power of vulnerability, and why we all benefit when we show up as our whole selves. I'm also the host of the Data Humans podcast where my motto is: data science is not one thing.

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.