Computational Skills
Data analysis, wrangling, and mining. Tableau. SalesForce. Machine Learning. Coding skills including MySQL, Redshift, Perl, Python, regular expressions, API Integrations, R, Excel, and PHP. Fluent in multiple operating systems including Mac OSX, Linux, and Windows.
Business Skills
Product/Business/Sales/Marketing Analytics including A/B testing, funnel conversion, margin analysis, product optimization, attribution models . Presentations (written and oral for technical and business audiences), project management, scientific writing, team coordination, pipeline development, training.
About Me
By day, I'm a data scientist who uses a combination of formal and self-taught programming knowledge to solve problems (generally of the business variety). In a non-professional capacity, I'm the lucky wife to Greg Gossett, mother to two amazing daughters, and care-taker of two troublesome cats. I'm a graduate of the University of South Carolina, and I got my PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. If I say "Carolina," I mean South Carolina, but after almost two decades in North Carolina I generally go to the extra effort to specify a cardinal direction now.
I've had a nearly life-long passion for data and using computers to solve problems. My first program was a Mendelian genetics simulator for horse coat colors written in C. From there, I took classes in several programming languages, including C++, Java, and Fortran as I made my way through high school and college. In college, I gravitated towards PHP as a simple but reasonably powerful web scripting language and used it to develop a horse-racing simulation for an online game. That same online game also provided my first introduction to MySQL and database architecture. I noticed my trend of combining technology and genetics and ended up in grad school studying gene regulation at the genomic level.
I'm a "go with the flow" sort of person when it comes to my career path, following my current interests and opportunities. I've been a professional editor for scientific manuscripts, run operations and helped launch a peer review service, transitioned to business analytics for a sales marketing company, followed my interest in data visualization to a natural language generation company, and then to Tableau as a solution engineer for the GSI team.
Research
My graduate work focused on the interactions between DNA, histones, and transcription factors at UNC Chapel Hill. My time in the lab spanned the -omics explosion. When I started, we were getting 10,000-20,000 data points per experiment. By the time I graduated, we were up to millions. I learned that I much preferred late nights coaxing code to work to late nights at the bench, so I accepted a primarily computational post-doc in Uwe Ohler's lab at Duke looking at RNA transcription start sites in Drosophila. This came to an early end when Uwe moved the lab back to Germany, but the year provided a great crash course in machine learning.
Publication history
Redundant canonical and noncanonical Caenorhabditis elegans p21-activated kinase signaling governs distal tip cell migrations.
Peters et al., G3 (Bethesda) 2013
In Vivo Effects of Histone H3 Depletion on Nucleosome Occupancy and Position in Saccharomyces cerevisiae.
Gossett and Lieb, PLoS Genetics 2012
Nucleosome sequence preferences influence in vivo nucleosome organization.
Kaplan et al., Nature Structural Molecular Biology 2010
High nucleosome occupancy is encoded at human regulatory sequences.
Tillo et al., PLoS One 2010
The DNA-encoded nucleosome organization of a eukaryotic genome.
Kaplan et al., Nature 2009
A library of yeast transcription factor motifs reveals a widespread function for Rsc3 in targeting nucleosome exclusion at promoters.
Badis et al., Molecular Cell 2008
DNA Immunoprecipitation (DIP) for the Determination of DNA-Binding Specificity.
Gossett and Lieb, CSH Protocols 2008
Hobbies
As mentioned, I've got two cats. I fostered several litters of kittens for Independent Animal Rescue before I became a foster "failure" and kept one. Our latest pair is also from IAR, and way more trouble than I remember young cats being. While in grad school, I helped transition their site from a static site to a database-driven custom CMS. I am a big fan of efficiency, and when they said that it sometimes took their web admin several weeks to get animals up on their website, I offered to redo the entire thing so that they would be in control of their data, leading to an automated system for submitting animal information and adoption applications.
I love learning new things and challenging myself with my hobbies - bonus points if it has a productive endpoint. An example - our air conditioning units turned our side yard into a muddy mess during the summer, so I learned how to build a retaining wall and put in a raised garden bed for blueberry bushes, turning an annoying problem into a delicious all-you-can-eat blueberry buffet each year. I'm also working towards making the rest of our suburban lawn more wildlife friendly, adding in parsley and milkweed plants to support native caterpillars. When it gets too hot outside to play in the dirt, I like to spend my time drawing and doing watercolor paintings.