Priyanka Vyas, Phd Email and Phone Number

If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But what if you have a Swiss Army knife? As a former business journalist, I used my hunger for knowledge and nose for news to report news stories. In my current role as a researcher, GIS consultant, data scientist, and lecturer, I use my curiosity to tell the story, given the data. Formally trained in public policy and political economy from the School of Economic, Political, and Policy Sciences at the University of Texas at Dallas and having completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine, I have a broad array of methodological tools and skill sets to work on interdisciplinary problems that can make a meaningful impact at the local, national, and global level. I have successfully used my educational training and experience on a variety of public policy issues in the realm of public health, environmental justice, and climate change and urban planning. My years of experience in using spatial and statistical analysis on a variety of challenging datasets has given me the confidence to teach myself new skills, explore the unknown, and find my path out from the forest. In the past few years, I have worn many different hats: researcher, lecturer for public health and GIS courses, consultant for local non-profit organizations, and workshop instructor for data science courses. I have given several talks at national conferences and at institutes of higher education. What drives me? I like to work on problems I care about and where I can make a meaningful difference based on my unique skills and experiences.