William Vann, Ph.D. Email & Phone Number

When I was in high school, I was the youngest student at Franklin Delano Roosevelt High School (Hyde Park, NY) to ever take AP Computer Science. That was back in the day when Pascal was the programming language favored in education, followed closely by Basic. I learned both and tinkered with them incessantly as a teen. I outperformed my older classmates on that AP exam (thanks for sharing this motivational tidbit with me, Ms. Hall!), but the real victory was that early training in algorithmic thinking. After a 20 year career in higher education, I find myself coming back around to my love for computational thinking and coding, this time with a special interest in unlocking the insights contained in data. You see, I tend to follow my intellectual curiosity wherever it happens to lead me. In college I tried on a few different majors until I finally felt at home in philosophy, with its rigorous set of analytical tools and examined worldviews. I knew I wanted to go the distance in philosophy, but I was interested in information science and libraries too. Despite having my head in the proverbial clouds of philosophical thinking, I was also eminently practical, it turns out. Get a Master's degree in information science and you'll always have a practical credential that allows you to work in libraries, I thought, and learning to be an expert researcher will come in handy during doctoral studies in philosophy. All of that thinking turned out to be sound. I earned my PhD from the U of MN and I've enjoyed my career in higher education teaching both philosophy and information science at the two-year college level. And yet that itch to code and solve problems computationally never quite left me. As I got deeper into automation and data wrangling in my librarian roles, I took a year-long sabbatical to learn Python. Suddenly I had a toolkit to make really useful apps, call APIs, scrape the web, automate tedious processes ... I was hooked on coding yet again. It wasn't long before I found the U of MN boot camp on data science that featured Python throughout, and discovered that data plus Python plus quantitative methods can yield interesting insights obtainable in no other way. This boot camp experience was so profound to me that I eagerly answered the call to be a teaching assistant for future data boot camps. So now I find myself entranced by data, hoping to pique your interest if what you seek is a data professional with an interesting, but very unusual, provenance!

Listed skills include Teaching, Python, Information Architecture, Analytical Skills, and 11 others.