PyData Vermont 2025

Abby is an Associate Professor of Statistics at the University of Vermont, where she directs the Justice Research Center. She is an applied statistician who leverages the power of data to bring communities, policy makers, and researchers together for meaningful change.

Ben Cooley is a Research Data Visualization Engineer at UVM's Complex Systems Institute and the Center for Community News. With a background in journalism, Ben sees visualization as fundamentally an exercise in data storytelling and has crafted numerous interactive stories to explain and expound upon complex topics. Previously, Ben has worked with scientists to visualize data at the Broad Institute, taught data visualization courses at Northeastern University, and created interactive data sites as a consultant for Cornell's Lab of Ornithology, flood relief platforms, and various online publications. You can see his portfolio here: https://benjamincooley.com/

I am a graduate student in Complex Systems and Data Science at the University of Vermont. My academic interests range from representation patterns in neural networks to open source data access.

Jayce Slesar is a data engineer at BETA Technologies focusing on the data platform and serving aircraft data across the organization to other team members and customers

Julia Witte Zimmerman and Ashley Fehr are members of the Computational Story Lab at the Vermont Complex Systems Institute (UVM). Julia is Postdoctoral Associate in Artificial Intelligence and Computational Social Science and Ashley is a PhD candidate. Their research interests include stories, conversation, and meaning construction at all linguistic scales.

Mike is a Senior Software Engineering Manager at NVIDIA working on RAPIDS where he manages teams working on RAPIDS Cloud and HPC deployments, build infrastructure and packaging, and PyData projects. He has also contributed to open source software projects in the PyData ecosystem such as Dask and Intake. He holds two bachelor's degrees in computer science and physics, and has over 20 years of experience in software engineering and scientific computing in domains spanning astronomy, computational sciences, data science, machine learning, business applications, and enterprise products.

Ming Zhao is an open-source developer and Developer Advocate at IBM Research, where he helps IBM leverage open technologies while building impactful tools and growing vibrant open-source communities. He’s passionate about making open tech accessible to all and ensuring developers have the tools they need to succeed in the rapidly developing AI space. Ming now leads community efforts around Docling, IBM’s fastest-growing open source project, recently welcomed into the LF AI & Data Foundation.

Naty is a Senior Software Engineer at NVIDIA. She is a former academic with a Masters in Physics and PhD in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering to her name. She is currently contributing to RAPIDS, but in the past has also contributed and maintained other open source projects such as Ibis and Dask. She is also an active member of PyLadies and an active volunteer and organizer of Women and Gender Expansive Coders DC meetups.

Stephen Smith is the Interactive Team Manager at GreenInfo Network, where he leads a team of designers, developers, and GIS specialists in building interactive mapping tools, data visualizations, and web applications for public interest organizations. His role bridges technical expertise and client engagement, guiding complex projects from idea to implementation while fostering a collaborative and innovative team culture.

Thibault Dody is a Senior Data Scientist at Faraday, specializing in scalable machine learning architectures for consumer behavior prediction. His previous work focused on developing methods to detect harmful online and social media content. He earned his Master’s degree in Computational Science from MIT.