Will Hipson

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.

Will Hipson is a data engineer at a medium-sized Canadian airport at the early stages of democratizing its data access. Will has a PhD in Psychology and Quantitative Analysis but transitioned out of academia after falling in love with R and data science. Now, he works across all areas of the data lifecycle, from building pipelines and maintaining databases to developing Shiny apps and Quarto docs for presenting data. He believes data engineering doesn't need to be synonymous with massive enterprise platforms or bleeding edge LLMs. Instead, most organizations simply need help finding data and making sense of it. At HIAA, he helped architect a data platform around data discovery, data literacy, and data governance. He built creative solutions for orchestrating data pipelines that resulted in the development of an R package called maestro (https://github.com/whipson/maestro/) that they recently released to the community.