Kara Woo
Senior Software Engineer at Posit PBC
Portland, Oregon, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolKara Woo is a Senior Software Engineer in Portland with 12 years building reliable, production-grade data and modeling services for healthcare, research, and product teams. She has led engineering efforts from tech lead roles to principal bioinformatics work, shipping CI/CD-driven Docker pipelines, scalable model-serving services, and data platforms used across dozens of studies for neurodegenerative disease research. A contributor to the widely used ggplot2 project, she’s fixed subtle statistical bugs and enhanced plotting features—evidence of both deep domain knowledge in data visualization and a commitment to open-source quality. Kara combines a rigorous ML/data-science engineering mindset with strong governance and metadata strategy, informed by an MLIS from the University of Washington and an environmental science background. Colleagues know her for turning research requirements into production workflows and for improving team practices through code review, documentation, and knowledge sharing.
12 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Library & Information Science (MLIS), Master of Library & Information Science (MLIS) at University of WashingtonSc.B., Environmental Science, Sc.B., Environmental Science at Brown UniversityEnvironmental Science, Environmental Science at Háskóli Íslands
Russian, English
Stackoverflow
3,615reputation
319kreached
65answers
5questions
if-statement
top-5%
r
top-5%
dplyr
top-5%
Github Skills (12)
data-visualizations10
data-visualization10
data-visualisation10
ggplot10
r10
documentation9
if-statement9
dplyr9
na6
subset6
stringr6
dataframe6
Programming languages (19)
Github contributions (5)
tidyverse/ggplot2
Jun 2017 - Oct 2020
An implementation of the Grammar of Graphics in R
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:11 reviews, 53 commits, 115 PRs in 3 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Kara primarily contributed to improving the `ggplot2` package by fixing bugs related to density calculations and documentation. They updated the codebase to address issues in density calculations for groups with one or two elements, ensuring accurate results. Additionally, they updated the documentation for discrete scales, ensuring that the documentation was consistent and correctly described the parameters that differed from continuous scales. They also refactored code to support features like setting the background color of saved plots, and added the `breaks` parameter to the `StatSummaryBin` function.
visualisationgrammar-of-graphicsggplot2grammardata-visualisation
Sage-Bionetworks/sagethemes
Jun 2020 - Feb 2021
Sage-branded plot themes
Contributions:4 reviews, 50 commits, 31 PRs in 8 months
brandedplotthemessage
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