On the 5th of December, we had a really successful end of the year session of Inspiring Women in Data Science! We had one of our inspirational talks where our protagonist of the day, Luisa Pires, shared with us her professional journey to become a Data Scientist and some insights of her daily work as Data Scientist at the Data and Statistics Division of the Bank of England.
Image 1. Luisa Pires explaining her journey into Data Science.
Around 6pm, all our attendees had the opportunity to meet the IWDS Team, Lucy, Darshna and Bianca, as they were ready to welcome everyone into the building and our meeting room, and be sure that everyone is getting some refreshments, tea or coffee before starting the session.
Then, Laura da Silva, founder of Inspiring Women in Data Science, started with a brief review of all the achievements that our Meetup group has got since it was founded early this year 2017 like a 500+ of inspired women, 7 sessions covered between inspirational talks and practical R and Python sessions, and all the contributions to other events like Techknow in the Ada Lovelace Day, Microsoft Future Decoded, GDG DevFest, and the Tech Day in the Feminist Library. Also, all our attendees were invited to actively be involved in our community “Nominating an Inspirational Speaker”, “Volunteering for Conferences” or “Mentoring in R or Python for practical sessions” (if you are interested just send us a message to our Meetup Group).
Image 2. Luisa Pires talks about The Data and Statistics Division and how she helps in their Journey into Data Science.
The inspirational moment started around 6:45pm when Luisa Pires went to the stage and explained us how her interest for data, numbers, patterns, etc. came from her childhood and how she and her sister Hanna had different motivations. She is an Engineer by education, she graduated from IST in Lisbon before doing a Masters in Delft, Holland. Then, she wanted to know more about modelling and algorithms, so she enrolled in a PhD in Information Engineering at the University of Cambridge, graduating in 2014. She learned through her PhD years about her passions, strengths and weaknesses, and definitively something that she discovered is that she wanted to know more about data analysis and data modelling, at the same time that she would like to help others to learn about it. Since then, she worked in Accenture for 2.5 years as part of the Analytics Group, where she discovered that algorithms and business can achieve great things together!
Image 3. Luisa Pires talks about why they use R as programming language in The Data and Statistics Division.
Currently Luisa Pires works in the Bank of England, and she helps the Data and Statistics Division to transition to more advanced tools & techniques, making the most of recent advances in Data Science. She joined Bank of England because she wanted to be involved in projects related to the Public sector. So, she has got exactly what she wanted, to help others to get into Data Analysis and Data Science, and work with data from the Public sector.
We had a really good venue for this session! Plenty of attendees willing to be inspired by one very successful Data Scientist! They were so engaged that I asked them if they wanted a break and nobody wanted. So, it was a non-break 3 hours from Luisa telling us about her journey and answering questions. Great feedback as well!
Thanks everyone for coming, but specially to Luisa for her inspirational talk.