Intro

Hi, I'm Ryan.

I am a data scientist with a background in neuroscience research and investigations, and currently looking for a new role. Capable of working independently and on a team, I have driven several scientific and data science projects to completion. I strive for efficient and clear insights derived from data science and software engineering best practices.

Technologies

• Python
• R
• SQL
• AWS
• linux

Skills

• Data mining (e.g. documents, OSINT, and web scraping)
• Data cleaning and loading
• Exploratory data analysis
• Data visualization
• Analytics and insights
• Technical communications and presentations

Data Science Projects

The following are a collection of projects that I've worked on, mostly in my spare time. Some are meant to install and use in other projects, some are works in progress, and some are stand-alone analyses.

General Tools

The following repos were written to be installed and used in other projects to streamline work.

Gordian

Project from Bellingcat's 2nd Hackathon. It was forked and adapted from the original project, which was a webapp, into a module that will assist with graph analysis and processing. Still a work in progress

link to source

DragonGlass

Module for programmatically working with the Obsidian notetaking platform. Allows the creation and mounting of vaults and writing and deleting notes.

link to source

Analytics

KOL Mapper

This project was written to mine all of the literature about a particular topic from Google Scholar and then do graph analysis to determine authors who are the most central to the field.

link to source

Air Quality

Project that ingested down data from swarms of atmospheric sensors from several air quality monitoring networks and combined with data from the TRAX air quality monitoring project. These data were then process and used to render dynamic heatmap animations of air quality over time in Salt Lake City, Utah. The heatmaps were generated using inverse density weighted calculation and rendering the maps with an unconventional combination of Mapdeck, Selenium, and image processing in Python.

source currently private

Inverse density weighted heat map of pm 2.5 air pollution in Salt Lake City, Utah during winter (common time for atmospheric inversion). The visualization was constructed from data collected by a swarm of fixed air sensors throughout the city and from the data read in from the elevated rail system. Can you find the copper smelter in the west of the city?

Visualization of pm 2.5 air pollution levels, as measured by the TRAX elevated rail system on The Forth of July. Can you tell when and where the firework show takes place?

Dashboards

Power Generators

Shiny dashboard that allows viewing of all power generators on the USA power grid and some analysis of different power generation technologies.

link to source

link to app

Yeast Genetics

Data was collected from several several sources (Kaggle and online scientific resources like Yeastract) and assembled into a shiny dashboard that allows the visualization of gene expression in different yeast strains and growing conditions.

link to source

link to app

link to data

Data Collection

pipycrawler

Docket image that sets up a containerized headless Selenium scraper on a raspberry pi system.

link to source

Pubmed/NCBI Abstract Miner

A script that uses the NCBI API to pull publicaiton information on a whole body of literature.

link to data

COVID Genome Webscrawler

A script that uses the NCBI API to pull genetic sequences of the COVID genome strains.

link

SGD_spider

Text

link

link to data

Yeastract Spider

Scraper for the site Yeastract.com. The data was used for the Yeast Genetics dashboard project above.

link

Ukraine Airspace

Webscraper that pulls flight data from a flight monitoring website with a geobounded box around Ukraine. This was set up to collect flight data from Ukraining airspace, running on a raspberry pi, starting 2 days before the Russian invasion and was run for several months.

source currently private

link to data

Scientific Projects

Transcription factors are proteins used by cells to switch genes on/off, regulating cellular programming (gene expression). I became interested in the molecular logic of gene expression while working as an undergraduate in the laboratory of Michael Rosbash on the expression of circadian genes and this trend carried through my graduate (Lloyd Greene) and postgraduate work (Alexandra Joyner).

Postdoctoral Work
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center

The engrailed family of homeodomain transcription factors are typically expressed in regions of developing tissue and play important roles for shaping those structures. Although, mutations in engrailed genes were known to cause disruptions in growth and shape of the developing cerebellum, our group chose to focus on a more targeted approach to identify the roles of these genes in specific cell lineages and developmental times. The work led to the discovery that a development of a set of deeper structures in the cerebellum and a signal integration hub for cerebellar activity, known as the cerbellar nuclei, affect the size and shape of the cerebellum as a whole.

The work also exposed me to graph theory for the first time and, together with the genomics component of the project, got me started me on my data science journey.
link

Ph.D. Work
Columbia University

GATA-2 is a zinc finger transcription factor that has been shown to be crucial for cell fate specification and proliferation in a number of different tissues and organisms. Originally identified in a screen as a gene regulated by nerve growth factor (NGF), and found to be expressed throughout the developing midbrain and sympathetic nervous system, I carried out a number of studies primarily using shRNA knockdown and in-utero electroporation on embryonic rat midbrain to demonstrate that GATA-2 is required for differentiation of neurons in the superior collicolus of the brain.
link

Additional papers (on programmed cell death)

RTP801/REDD1 Regulates the Timing of Cortical Neurogenesis and Neuron Migration
link

Sertad1 Plays an Essential Role in Developmentaland Pathological Neuron Death
link

Curriculum Vitae

Ryan T. Willett, Ph.D.

Professional Experience

Education

Publications

Contact

• Twitter
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• GitHub
• Kaggle

Elements

i = 0;

while (!deck.isInOrder()) {
    print 'Iteration ' + i;
    deck.shuffle();
    i++;
}

print 'It took ' + i + ' iterations to sort the deck.';