Amanda Pogue

About Me

I grew up in Toronto, Canada to a South African Chinese mother and Irish Canadian father. I studied psychology as an undergraduate and worked in a variety of developmental psychology and psycholinguistics labs for 10+ at the University of Toronto, Harvard, NYU, the University of Waterloo, and at the University of Rochester. I defended my PhD at the University of Rochester in 2018, where I studied how people developed generalizations about others based on past communication. Following that I was a Data Science Fellow with the NYC Insight Data Science fellowship, which I am still involved with to this day (I really enjoy talking with aspiring data scientists, and am happy to chat, especially with diverse candidates looking to get into data science and tech).

Since then I have been working as a client-facing data scientist, supporting projects and teams at Fortunate 500 companies in kicking off new projects, and putting models into implimentation. I was also involved in an AI research team developing new tools for Research teams leveraging state of the art NLP tools. In this time I also got involved in product development and have a real love for working on cross-functional teams to build better products for users.

A current version of my CV can be found here.

Work

During the work week I am a data scientist in product analytics working for a CDP company called ActionIQ. In my career as a data scientist I have come to love working with product teams to make data driven decisions about product development by understanding users' needs and workflows. We can go beyond building tools to simplify a user's day-to-day work and can instead build products that are beautiful, intuitive, and can help users achieve more success.

In addition to this, I am really passionate about ethics, diversity, and inclusivity in data science, ML, and AI. I believe that as individuals we can make a difference in the workplace by holding our culture accountable, and by living our moral code in our everyday lives. Sometimes the hardest thing to do is get started, so start small - donate to your local mutual aid, help pack care packages, volunteer at a foodbank, plan a tree planting event for your company, support small businesses, or volunteer to mentor BIPOC folks looking to get into the field.

Fun

Things that I like a lot:

• Biking! I used to be a bike commuter prior to living in NYC and got back into it in the pandemic
• MUSIC!
• Museums! This is my infequently updated museum blog
• Beer! While Untappd won't tell you everything you need to know about my love for beer, it might tell you a little about my data collection habits
• NYT Cooking! and cooking in general
• Reading! I actually miss having time on my commute to read
• PLANTS! I live in a little jungle and wouldn't have it any other way
• Puzzles! They turn out to be a great networking tool, but also a great stress reliever
• Street Art!
• Coffee!
• Shopping Local!
• Traveling!

Things that I like to learn:

• Learning Languages: currently studying Spanish
• Guitar
• Coding: currently studying Spark and Scala

Weird little things:

• Amanda Commits: my #lolcommits twitter feed for hipster photos of me fixing typos in my code and committing it to git

Contact

• Twitter
• Instagram
• GitHub
• LinkedIn

Elements

i = 0;

while (!deck.isInOrder()) {
    print 'Iteration ' + i;
    deck.shuffle();
    i++;
}

print 'It took ' + i + ' iterations to sort the deck.';