Adam Obeng
Senior Staff Data Scientist
Berkeley, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolAdam Obeng is a Senior Staff Data Scientist based in Berkeley with 14 years of experience bridging academic research and industrial machine learning at organizations including Pinterest and Meta. He combines technical leadership with hands-on engineering—contributing to core open-source tooling like quanteda and pandas by strengthening file processing and test automation. Trained as a sociologist (PhD, Columbia) with advanced study at Oxford, he specializes in computational social science and scalable ML systems that inform product and research decisions. Adam teaches graduate courses at UC Berkeley and has a history of building reproducible data infrastructure and rigorous test suites across languages (R and Python). He is known for translating complex social-science questions into production-ready analytics and for improving robustness in widely used libraries—an often unseen but high-leverage contribution.
14 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Nuffield College Master of Sciences Sociology, Nuffield College Master of Sciences Sociology at University of OxfordInternational Baccalaureate, International Baccalaureate at UWC Atlantic CollegeDoctor of Philosophy (PhD) Sociology, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Sociology at Columbia University
English, French, Spanish, python
Stackoverflow
1,532reputation
70kreached
23answers
1question
extend
top-5%
python
top-5%
Github Skills (29)
tokenize10
python10
r10
testing10
pandas10
tokenizer10
test-automation10
text-analytics9
unit-testing9
extend9
natural-language-processing9
data-analysis9
unit-test9
datastructures-algorithms8
data-structures8
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
quanteda/quanteda
Apr 2016 - Jun 2018
An R package for the Quantitative Analysis of Textual Data
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Test Automation EngineerContributions:301 commits, 52 PRs, 138 pushes in 2 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Adam Obeng contributed to the quanteda R package by modifying and extending functionality related to text file processing, particularly for structured data. Key changes involved enhancements to handle different docvars in structured text files and to improve the robustness of the code. Furthermore, the user wrote new tests for the changes, improving the overall quality and coverage of the package.
r-packagetext-analyticsquantedaquantitative-analysiscorpus
pandas-dev/pandas
Nov 2012 - Dec 2012
Flexible and powerful data analysis / manipulation library for Python, providing labeled data structures similar to R data.frame objects, statistical functions, and much more
Role in this project:QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:5 commits in 15 days
Contributions summary:Adam primarily contributed to the testing aspects of the pandas library. Their commits focused on enhancing and expanding DataFrame.to_csv tests, including adding test cases with specific line terminators and leading commas. They also added a test for the default line terminator and corrected documentation related to the DataFrame.any() method.
pythondatalabeled-datamanipulationdataframes
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