Brenton Wiernik
Senior User Experience Researcher at Meta
Tampa, Florida, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBrenton Wiernik is a senior user experience researcher and quantitative scientist who blends psychology, applied statistics, and software development to turn complex data into actionable product insights. With 12 years of experience spanning academia, consulting, and industry, he has built statistical models, taught and published on methodology, and developed widely used R tooling for research synthesis and model tidying. At Meta he focuses on trust, safety, and user experience while previously leading brand-level quantitative research and running a consulting practice advising government, industry, and academic clients. His open-source contributions include enhancements to popular projects like Zotero and the easystats ecosystem—demonstrating full-stack skills from DOI-handling browser extensions to backend R package maintenance. Brenton’s background as a PhD-trained statistician and former assistant professor gives him rare depth in both rigorous measurement and practical product decision-making. He often pairs technical code work with storytelling and training, helping teams adopt reproducible workflows and clearer evidence-based decisions.
12 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Quantitative Psychology, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Quantitative Psychology at University of MinnesotaUniversity of Minnesota Twin Cities
French
Stackoverflow
346reputation
50kreached
3answers
1question
Github Skills (35)
javascript10
file-management10
performance-monitor10
r10
plugin-development10
package-development10
statistics10
machine-learning10
data-analytics10
statistic10
plugin10
tidy10
performance-analysis10
api10
tidyr10
Programming languages (24)
Github contributions (5)
bwiernik/zotero-shortdoi
Nov 2017 - Feb 2022
Zotero extension to retrieve and validate DOIs and shortDOIs
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:20 releases, 68 commits, 9 PRs in 4 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Brenton primarily contributed to the Zotero extension, focusing on improving its DOI and shortDOI functionality. They fixed bugs, refined the build process, and added features such as automatic retrieval of long DOIs. The user worked with JavaScript and potentially HTML/CSS within the extension, modifying the core scripts to handle DOI lookups and tag management.
validatezoteroretrieve
jlegewie/zotfile
Oct 2013 - Nov 2015
Zotero plugin to manage your attachments: automatically rename, move, and attach PDFs (or other files) to Zotero items, sync PDFs from your Zotero library to your (mobile) PDF reader (e.g. an iPad, Android tablet, etc.), and extract PDF annotations.
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:9 commits, 1 PR, 13 comments in 2 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Brenton primarily focused on enhancing the ZotFile plugin for Zotero by adding new features and improving existing functionalities. Their contributions included implementing options for author truncation in renaming, adding support for editor wildcards, and incorporating senior author wildcards. They also made modifications to the code, addressing indent issues and updating various files.
pdf-generationreaderandroid-tabletpdfattach
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