Data Analytics
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For questions or information, please contact:

Maryalice Wu
Director of Data Analytics
Center for Innovation in
Teaching & Learning
(217) 244-0937
citl-data@illinois.edu
Meet Our Staff

Maryalice Wu

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Maryalice is the Director of Data Analytics at the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning and an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Sociology. She has a Ph.D. in Sociology from Illinois and has been working in statistical consulting at the University since 1999. Her recent research focuses on the economic and health empowerment of women in developing nations. Her other projects relate to program evaluations in academia, including research on the impact of MOOCS (Massive Open Online Courses). She has taught several courses at Illinois, including Introduction to Social Statistics (SOC 280) and Social Research Methods (Soc 380).

Dawn Owens

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Dawn is the Senior Data and Survey Scientist at CITL and the University's official representative to the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). She has an M.A. in Sociology from Illinois and has worked in the data group (and its former incarnations) in various capacities since 1989. She manages learning analytics data from several sources, helps administers several campus surveys, and provides social science data to members of the university community. She also provides consulting on data management and programming.

Kit Santa Ana

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Since graduating from Illinois with a B.A. in Economics, Kathleen has taken on the role of Data & Survey Scientist in the Data Analytics unit of CITL. This role focuses on cleaning and coding data for analysis, producing recurring summary statistical reports, and programming online data collection tools. She has a well-working knowledge of SPSS, Python, LaTeX, XML, and their various applications in streamlining data cleaning and reporting. She also has experience in managing and harmonizing datasets across multiple time points (longitudinal and milestone data), multiple survey revisions, and multiple modes of implementation.

Paige Cunningham

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Paige is a Data and Survey Scientist with CITL's Data Analytics group. She has both an M.S. and Ph.D. in Library and Information Science, an M.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies, and a B.A. in Anthropology. At CITL, she works on data collection, preparation, management, and documentation for a variety of projects including online program evaluation and Illinois' Coursera learning analytics assessment. She is also part of the Illini Success data analysis team shared between CITL and the Career Center.

Aleena Khan

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Aleena Khan is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Political Science at Illinois. Her current academic research focuses on understanding American identity and perceptions of anti-Americanism in the United States. Aleena is also an Associate Policy Researcher at Princeton University's Bridging Divides Initiative, where she works on tracking threats and harassment to local public officials across the United States. Before coming to Illinois, Aleena worked as. Research Assistant at the Human Services Research Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts and earned a B.A. in political science from Simmons University. Her expertise lies in survey design and survey experiments using Qualtrics. She also has experience with some Qualitative methods (interviewing and Q-sort), database querying using SQL, creating basic dashboards in Tableau and R Shiny, as well as inferential statistics in R and Stata.

Deli Yang

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Deli Yang is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Political Science at Illinois. His research interests lie at the intersection of international conflict and cooperation. Before coming to Illinois, he completed dual M.Sc. and M.L. in International Affairs with the London School of Economics and Peking University. He has worked on statistical inference with experimental and observational data using tools such as Stata and SAS. He also has knowledge of database querying languages such as SQL and MongoDB.

Maggie Zhang

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Maggie Zhang is a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute of Communications Research in Illinois. She is also a Master's student in Computer Science at UIUC. Her scholarship is at the intersection of computational social science, social computing, and political communication. Her research combines natural language processing and computer vision methods as well as experiments to look into the media effect on people's opinions and behaviors. She is proficient in R, and Python. She is also familiar with (quasi-) experiment design and big data analysis.

Nathan Jeffery

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Nathan is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Sociology who enjoys working with both quantitative and qualitative data. He has experience programming, managing, and exporting surveys, and is deeply involved in the transition to a campus-wide Qualtrics license. For the transition, he has co-written R scripts and API calls and learned the ins and outs of the Qualtrics platform. He also has experience in creating ggplot2 graphics and basic Tableau dashboards, and has run inferential statistics in Stata, SPSS, Excel, and jamovi. His non-academic interests include crocheting, baking bread, and playing Pokemon GO with his spouse.

Rik Ray

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Rik is a Ph.D. student at the Institute of Communications Research. His primary academic interest lies in media audience analysis, using survey, observational, and digital trace data. A bachelor's in Geology with minors in Physics and Mathematics, and a lifelong interest in computer science greatly influences his approach to thinking about social science research. A keen interest in methodology has also resulted in collaborations across a variety of substantive research topics. Some of his recent works have incorporated quasi-experimental designs, multi-level modeling, and Item Response Theory scaling. He is proficient with R, Stata, and SPSS for statistical modeling, and prefers Python for web scraping, natural language processing, geospatial mapping, and other general-purpose programming. He is also familiar with the CyberGISX platform, ArcGIS, and QGIS. 

Xinchang Zhou

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Xinchang is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Educational Psychology, with a specialization in Quantitative and Qualitative Methodology, Measurement, and Evaluation. Her research primarily focuses on structural equation modeling, covering various topics from factor analysis to hierarchical models. She is skilled in handling complex data issues, including missing, nonnormal, and categorical data. Xinchang primarily employs R for her work, but she is also adaptable in using SPSS, Mplus, Excel, and Stata. She has served as a teaching assistant for various quantitative methods courses and provided R workshops.