2023 Year in Review.

Personal and professional accomplishments.

Shannon Pileggi
2023-12-18

TL; DR

Highlights from this year included focusing on personal health and wellness, joining the R-Ladies Leadership Team, participating in the R Project Sprint, and teaching various workshops.

Professional

R-Ladies

It has been such an honor to join the Leadership Team of R-Ladies Global! I am grateful to volunteer alongside and serve such talented, dedicated, and thoughtful individuals on the Leadership Team, the wider Global Team, and the broader R-Ladies community. To learn more about what we have been up to watch the beautiful presentation Sustainable Growth of Global Communities: R-Ladies’ Next Ten Years by Riva Quiroga at posit::conf(2023) and read the website News.

5 women standing together taking a selfie in front of a wall full of hex stickers.

Figure 1: Riva Quiroga (Chile), Athanasia Mowinckel (Norway), Averi Giudicessi (US), Yanina Bellini Saibene (Argentina), and Shannon Pileggi (US) of the R-Ladies Leadership Team meeting in person for the first time at posit::conf(23).

R Project Sprint

I learned how to contribute to base R at the R Project Sprint in Coventry, England. This was an amazing experience to meet in person with diverse programmers from around the world - you can read more in my R Project Sprint blog post.

38 participants in-person in a classroom space: 1st row sitting on floor, 2nd row kneeling or sitting in chairs, 3rd row standing. Two remote participants shown on video conference in screen to the left of the group.

Figure 2: R Project Sprint participants, with remote participants shown on video conference. Not all particpants photographed.

Teaching

I still really enjoy teaching, and I am grateful for the opportunities I have teach on the side! This year I taught:

Shannon and David stand in front of a projected slide that has an image of a disarry of silver forks, knives and spoons with the title "Using... control" shown - "version" is blocked by David's head.

Figure 3: Shannon Pileggi and E. David Aja teaching “Using version control” for R-Ladies Philly in preparation for posit::conf(23).

Work

I have been working remotely for the Prostate Cancer Clinical Trials Consortium (PCCTC) since October, 2021, and I still really enjoy it! I generally spend my days thinking deeply about data, coding, and how to count things. A big shift for me this year was moving to more of a managerial role as our team grew, and I now have three direct reports. This resulted in a lot of code review, which includes checking for code efficiency, reproducibility, documentation of reasoning, understanding of the input data, confirming correct derivation of new variables, and ensuring polished deliverables.

Meghan, Shannon,and Victoria are wearing sunglasses and holding cocktails. Photo taken on a boat; background is water and shiny, tall city buildings.

Figure 4: Meghan Harris, Travis Gerke, Shannon Pileggi, and Victoria Catherine of the PCCTC Data Science team at an all company in-person meeting in New York City.

Writing

This is only my 2nd blog post this year, which is an intentional drop from previous years. I do still enjoy writing, but it is time consuming and I did accept other responsibilities. Also, see the Personal section.

Other

I attended PHUSE Connect US 2023 in person in Orlando, Florida in February (a Clinical Data Science Conference). This was my first conference in the industry and it was wonderful to connect with and learn from others. At the conference I presented Introducing {gtreg}: an R package to produce regulatory tables for clinical research, a package I collaborated on with Daniel Sjoberg to easily make beautiful adverse event tables1.

Personal

This year I have also focused on my health and well-being. This included efforts in consuming a balanced diet2, getting sufficient sleep at night3, and exercising4.

Reading

Part of getting sufficient sleep meant cutting back on tinkering at my computer late a night (hence less writing) and instead reading to relax at bedtime. I read over 25 fiction novels this year (compared with ~3 the previous year); highlights included Demon Copperhead, A Thousand Splendid Suns, Remarkably Bright Creatures, and the Scholomance trilogy.

Exercise

The gym I joined focuses on both metabolic training and weight training, and it has a wonderful community culture. The new routine resulted in a significant amount of weight loss and strength gain5. I am proud to say I can do unassisted chin-ups and pull-ups for the first time in my life!

Shannon is off the ground, holding on to a bar overhead, with arms at 90 degrees, head about to come above the bar.

Figure 5: Shannon doing a pull-up.

Vacations

Lastly, as a family we also focused on planning time away. We had a great mix of both individual and family vacations, that we look forward to continuing in the future.

Photo taken from the front seat of a car looking back; two girls are wearing head phones and looking down at ipads. In between is a giant pink stuffed snake with bright yellow eyes.

Figure 6: Returning home from our family beach vacation, with the massive stuffed snake that we won at the arcade.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Yanina Bellini Saibene, whose amazing year end reviews inspired me to write my own. I am always in awe of how much she accomplishes.

  1. Yes, I think great tables are beautiful.↩︎

  2. Yes, I count my macros on the MacroFactor app.↩︎

  3. Yes, I track my sleep on Whoop.↩︎

  4. Yes, I join a gym.↩︎

  5. Yes, I’d be happy to chat about how much I can deadlift, bench press, etc., any time.↩︎

Reuse

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Citation

For attribution, please cite this work as

Pileggi (2023, Dec. 18). PIPING HOT DATA: 2023 Year in Review.. Retrieved from https://www.pipinghotdata.com/posts/2023-12-18-2023-year-in-review/

BibTeX citation

@misc{pileggi20232023,
  author = {Pileggi, Shannon},
  title = {PIPING HOT DATA: 2023 Year in Review.},
  url = {https://www.pipinghotdata.com/posts/2023-12-18-2023-year-in-review/},
  year = {2023}
}