Jane Liang

Research Scientist at Kaiser Permanente Division of Research

I served as a TA for BST 260 (Introduction to Data Science) in Fall 2019 and Fall 2020, taught both years by Heather Mattie at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (HSPH). I am passionate about making data analysis more accessible for those who may not have had formal training in statistics. My favorite part about teaching (besides working with students) is designing curriculum materials that incorporate both practical application and critical thinking.

The course materials that I created for BST 260 are listed below. Each assignment is designed to mimic a realistic data analysis, with the questions building toward an overarching narrative. In addition to R coding exercises, many questions emphasize interpreting results or data science communication. Topics and data sets were chosen to be relevant to student interests and pressing public health challenges.

You can find the course website for the most recent iteration of BST 260 here. While serving as an HSPH pedagogy fellow, I also helped develop BST 219 (Core Principles of Data Science), a gentle data science course geared toward those with no prior quantitative/programming background, offered for the first time in 2022.

Homework assignments:

Homework 1 (web scraping and wrangling H1N1 influenza pandemic data from Wikipedia)
Homework 3 (interactively visualizing Gapminder data in an R Shiny app)

Lab assignments:

Lab 4: ggplot2 and Visualization Principles (improving COVID-19 data visualizations published by the Georgia Department of Public Health)
Lab 5: Shiny Apps and Mapping (building an R Shiny app and heatmap of arrests in the United States)
Lab 8: Machine Learning I (machine learning terminology, logistic regression, and Naive Bayes using breast cancer biopsy data)
Lab 9: Machine Learning II (kNN, LDA, QDA, decision trees, bagging, and random forests using simulations, birthweight data, and gene expression data)

Exams:

2020 take-home midterm (building and exploring an interactive reporting dashboard for worldwide COVID-19 cases)

Teaching