About Us

We teach data science and programming workshops and help researchers overcome technical challenges in their work with the Northwestern IT Research Computing Services team. If you're a part of the Northwestern community -- student, staff, postdoc, faculty -- you can get data science and programming help for free.

Colby Witherup Wood - Colby is a Data Scientist on the Research Computing Services Team, with an academic background in comparative plant genomics. She assists researchers on all types of Data Science projects, runs BYOD (Bring Your Own Data) Working Groups, and supervises a team of graduate and undergraduate student consultants. Colby has been developing and teaching Python workshops at Northwestern for the past two years, including her Next Steps in Python series of short lessons on intermediate Python topics. She has been teaching formally and informally most of her life, including running nature programming for families in Chicago and Vermont, and many years as a ballet instructor for young children in Evanston and New York City. Colby can be reached at [e-mail].

Christina Maimone - Christina is Research Data Services Lead with Research Computing Services. She works to build services to support Northwestern researchers and grow the data science community at the university. She works mostly with R, SQL, and Python but has solved problems with most data analysis programs. She writes documents in Markdown unless you make her do otherwise. Christina is also a lecturer in the MS in Health Analytics program at Northwestern and has created courses for online data science platforms. She works to support research computing professionals, academic data science staff, and research software engineers through CaRCC and US-RSE. Her current personal challenge is coaching a soccer team for 6-year-olds. Get in touch via [e-mail].