Ista Zahn
Assistant Director Of Data Management
Massachusetts, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolIsta Zahn is an Assistant Director of Data Management with 15 years of experience applying data science and analytics to education and public health institutions. Currently leading data management at Boston Public Schools, she has a track record of turning operational data into actionable systems that improve student transportation and safety. Her background includes rigorous statistical work at Harvard Business School and hands-on software and data science leadership at the Dominici Lab, blending research-grade methods with production-ready tooling. An active open-source contributor, she improved Emacs tooling in the widely used Spacemacs project—bringing reproducible workflows for scientific languages like R, LaTeX, and Octave to the community. Trained in psychology (MA, University of Rochester; BA, University of Oregon), she combines quantitative rigor with a human-centered approach to data governance and team training.
14 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's degree, Psychology, Bachelor's degree, Psychology at University of OregonMaster's degree, Social Psychology, Master's degree, Social Psychology at University of Rochester
Stackoverflow
10,219reputation
2.2mreached
158answers
1question
dataframe
top-5%
subset
top-1%
r
top-1%
reshape
top-5%
Github Skills (19)
r10
configuration-management10
vim10
emacs10
configuration-file10
configurations10
subset10
reshape9
dataframe9
ggplot9
latex9
helm7
octave7
plyr6
knitr6
Programming languages (21)
Github contributions (5)
syl20bnr/spacemacs
Jul 2015 - Jun 2016
A community-driven Emacs distribution - The best editor is neither Emacs nor Vim, it's Emacs *and* Vim!
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:10 commits, 11 PRs, 105 comments in 10 months
Contributions summary:Ista contributed significantly to the Spacemacs configuration, specifically focusing on the Emacs support system (ESS) and LaTeX layers. Their work involved modifying package configurations, introducing new functionalities like smart equals and REPL commands for ESS, and integrating features such as automatically setting latexmk build command and adjusting helm for file and buffer management. They also introduced an octave layer and enhanced company backends for greater user configuration capabilities.
configurationvimspacemacsemacsemacs-lsp
BostonPublicSchools/BPSTranspoReportR
Dec 2022 - Mar 2023
R package for generating transportation department reports
Contributions:3 releases, 39 commits, 7 PRs in 3 months
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