Spotlight on 🔦Sara Villa🔦
- svillahdez
- 3 days ago
- 2 min read
Sara Villa (she/her) Community Manager at DSxHE
Senior fellow at OLS/CM at The Turing Way
Contact:
What does your job actually entail?
As community manager, my job focuses on taking care of the community so they can do all the important hard work happening at DSxHE. You can find me checking surveys and analysing our own data regarding community engagement, gardening Slack and LinkedIn and being as available as people in the community need. My community offers and my community asks are actually quite similar: feel free to contact me with any idea, suggestion or crazy thought you might have to improve our community! I just hope to empower DSxHE community as much as I can!
Why did you join the DSxHE community?
I joined DSxHE because as a researcher with previous experience managing data, I can see how messy it can get and how easy it is to forget the essential and important bits. Health equity should be at the forefront of any healthcare project planning steps, and I love that DSxHE is connecting all the people working towards that goal.
When not at work, you can be found...
Cooking, listening to a podcast, having fun with my family and/or a drink with friends. I'm also enjoying a lot reading about Systems thinking and Community gatherings ;)
What’s a topic in data science/health equity that you know/care a lot about - why is it important/interesting, tell us about it!
I used to do a lot of genomic sequencing analysis in order to study chronic pain essential pathways. We always considered sex when designing our experiments, but I never got the chance to actually study specific sex differences in pain (we would need a very big sample size that wasn’t feasible at the time). If I ever go back to experimental research, I would love to focus on those bits, and try to inform health equity gaps in pain treatment.
What’s a recent article/book/video/blog/event you’ve come across on data science and/or health equity that you found interesting and why?
I am really enjoying the blog series between Lab of Lived experience and DSxHE, particularly Data science as resistance.
What is your go-to lazy dinner?
Store-bough pizza base with nice passata and tons of mozzarella and Roquefort
What is not a big deal to most people but is torture to you?
Unloading the dishwasher
What dish do you cook best?
Lentils with chorizo or any kind of meat stew
What is your favourite board game?
I recently loved playing In vino morte
What quote resonates with you?
If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito
What is the best advice you ever received?
‘Science is not made by following a path’ (direct translation from a saying an old man told me once)
Which moment would you most like a do-over of?
None, I like consequences, it’s the only way to learn.
What trait most defines who you are? Mettle
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