Discovering New Opportunities through Data Science | Graduate Spotlight

James Gilbert of Data Science Cohort 5 is a researcher and quality control analyst in the pharmaceutical industry. “In Nashville, the field for protein research is not super big,” James mentions in his podcast. Ready for new opportunities, James decided to gain new skills with Nashville Software School’s (NSS) Statistics for Data Science program and was hooked. “That was the first time I had ever seen Python code and honestly I fell in love with it,” he remembers. “It was a really cool way of solving problems.” 

"NSS's commitment to Nashville and growing the tech community here."

What was the topic of your capstone and how did you choose it?

“I’ve worked in healthcare research for the entirety of my career. One of the core values that you’ll find in any healthcare setting is that the patient comes first. Everything we do, we do for them. For me personally, that meant studying drug activity to make more efficacious drugs, and later, Quality Control environmental monitoring of cleanroom facilities to ensure the medicines we produced were safe and free of contamination. I recognized the opportunity to digitize older records to generate data and adopt new technology and practices. I wanted to leverage my base of knowledge and apply the new skills I had learned at Nashville Software School to make everyone’s lives easier when it came to analyzing our clean room data. 

I really enjoyed the problem solving that this project presented. I used Leaflet in a way that it was not typically used. I wanted to make a map using a floorplan of the facility so I could make inferences and predictions about the data relative to the manufacturing space. I also wanted it to be interactive because let’s face it, interactivity is cool when it comes to visualizing data. Geospatial tools are useful for this, but I was unable to find many examples of people trying to do what I was trying to do. I found a way to overlay an image file of a drug manufacturing facility floor plan onto a leaflet map so I could place coordinates onto the sampling locations and assess the cleanliness of a clean room.” Read more about James’ capstone project on his github. 

​​What advice would you give to current or incoming NSS Data students? 

HIRE JAMES

Since graduating from Part-time Data Science Cohort 5, James is on the search for his first, post-bootcamp job and is looking forward to growing his skills as a data scientist. 

“As a data scientist, I apply the same passion to helping businesses understand their past data to pivot in the present and plan for the future.” 

Get to know more about James’ NSS journey and capstone project when you listen to his podcast below or by checking out his LinkedIn profile.  

Meet more of the graduates from Part-time Data Science Cohort 5 by visiting their class website!