UW Certificate in Data Science: Alumni Spotlight

Alum Neva Corrigan explains how the UW Certificate in Data Science helped strengthen her background in statistics and allowed her to analyze data in new ways, completely changing her career trajectory. To learn more, visit: https://www.pce.uw.edu/certificates/d...

Video Transcript:

[Neva Corrigan] I've been working here at the University of Washington for a little over 20 years as a research scientist. I currently work for the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences, as well as the Institute on Human Development and Disability.

When we collect data for a subject with MRI, we often collect up to like hundreds of gigabytes of data in one scan, and you need to find patterns in it. Now, in the past 20 years, my job has been to go in there and find the patterns myself. The data we're collecting is so incredibly rich, but there's so much of it. But machine learning has the power to actually help utilize these vast amounts of data and actually find patterns in it.

I became aware of people asking for this need from—most of these were affiliates of the Institute on Human Development and Disability, and I decided to take the University of Washington Certificate in Data Science course.

The online format is incredibly convenient because it's one class, 3 hours in the evening, one day a week. It just made it very easy to go in there and focus for 3 hours in a quiet space in my home.

The other students were from very diverse backgrounds. They were working for many different types of companies, had many different types of jobs. I wouldn't have expected a remote class to allow for so many interpersonal interactions between students and between the students and the teacher. But it also gave me an opportunity to meet some fellow women who—really bright women in the area, and we actually formed a bit of a study group ourselves and were actually able to learn from each other and teach each other.

What surprised me the most about the program is how much it's changed my career. Just one course! It allowed us to answer questions that I didn't even think could be answered, which is fantastic.

So one question that our donors had and that my boss had been asking me is, from the adolescent data we had acquired before and after COVID, whether or not we could look at the effects of the COVID lockdowns on the brain. And my answer was no. However, after I'd taken the data science course, I was able to talk with a machine learning expert on campus, Ariel Rokem, and he was able to instantly tell me what to do, how I could actually look at this, even though our data didn't fit traditional statistical models. And I was able to implement and we were able to come up with results that are really fascinating, which we just presented at the Society for Neuroscience Conference and we're just putting into publication now. The COVID lockdown had effects on actual brain structure in teenagers, and this effect was more extreme in females than in males. And this is a completely novel finding that we've gotten a lot of attention for.

For all the years I have been studying the brain here, it's seldom that you really come across a finding that is momentous enough for people actually—the news to actually pay attention, that I can talk to people about—my family about and they say, “Wow!” Everybody says, “Wow!” We can all understand it, COVID affected the brain.

I do see this as the first result of many, and I have found the data science course to actually have enhanced my career so much that I'm really excited to be able to build on it additionally. I'm going to be taking, starting at the end of this month, the UW Certificate in Machine Learning course because I think that's going to really help me even dig deeper. It's basically allowed me to see a future where I'm going to change my trajectory and move in this direction because I love it.