Situation

High-stakes domains like medicine need decision models that practitioners can inspect, trust, and explain — not black-box algorithms.

Task

Build an accessible R tool for constructing fast-and-frugal decision trees grounded in academic decision science.

Action

Designed and published the FFTrees R package with a companion algorithm, visualization tools, and an interactive web builder.

Result

Published in Judgment and Decision Making and cited over 100 times — with applications in radiation dose triage for lung cancer, lung cancer screening criteria, and clinical course prediction in respiratory disease.

Situation

A team of data scientists at a large pharmaceutical company relied on thousands of lines of fragile, undocumented SQL and SAS — slow to run, hard to audit, and inaccessible to non-expert users.

Task

Overhaul the team's end-to-end EHR data pipeline into a reproducible, human-readable system.

Action

Designed and led development of FlatironKitchen — an internal R package covering database connections, cohort derivation, variable creation, and visualization in a unified, human-readable API.

Result

Became the team's analytical backbone; presented at rstudio::conf 2020 to an audience of data scientists across industry. A senior epidemiologist reported: "It's like heaven."