Ren is the Senior Data Scientist Manager of The Lab @ DC, where they and their team try to bring together data science, statistics, and social science to serve the District’s residents in a data-driven manner through impact evaluation and predictive modeling.
Ren joined the Lab in March 2020. Prior to joining The Lab @ DC, they worked in statistical research and analysis, and in machine learning for international development organizations (World Bank and Inter American Development Bank) and for private companies in the field of labor equity. In this process, they have acquired expertise in small area estimation methods, complex survey analysis, imputation methods, impact evaluation, machine learning, and data science more generally. And statistics, statistics, statistics.
Ren holds a PhD in Economics from Duke University. They have been living in the District since 2006. When not at work, Ren can be found running or practicing yoga or walking endlessly (especially on mountainsides); watching movies filmed decades ago in grainy black-and-white and with subtitles; reading “serious” and “genre” fiction, and history, politics, and astronomy in non-fiction. Their truly guilty pleasures are having maths and statistics as hobbies; and mastering role-playing game systems they will never have time to play. Ren dreams that, one day, they’ll be fully Bayesian, possibly live on Mars, or be fully Bayesian while living on Mars. It's nice to dream.