Thomas Leeper
Staff Research Scientist at Meta
Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States
Summary
đ¤Š
Rockstarđ
Top SchoolThomas Leeper is a staff research scientist and software-savvy behavioral scientist with 13 years of experience bridging political science research and production data systems. He builds data-driven software and experiments to improve computational and human decision-making, pairing a PhD in political science with hands-on engineering work at Meta. An active R hacker and open-source contributor, he has improved documentation for the widely used Dataverse research data repository and contributed backend S3 tooling to the cloudyr ecosystem. His background ranges from academic roles at LSE and Aarhus to applied research and engineering at scale, giving him a rare mix of rigorous causal inference skills and practical API- and cloud-focused development experience.
13 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
BA, Political Science and Global Studies, BA, Political Science and Global Studies at University of MinnesotaPhD, Political Science, PhD, Political Science at Northwestern University
Stackoverflow
44,107reputation
5.6mreached
867answers
12questions
namespaces
top-5%
dataframe
top-5%
package
top-5%
if-statement
top-5%
latex
top-5%
loops
top-5%
Github Skills (41)
r10
amazon-api10
api-documentation10
api10
aws-s310
documentation10
missing-data9
matrix9
dataframe9
if-statement9
apidoc9
forloop9
loops9
amazon-web-services9
plot9
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
cloudyr/aws.s3
Dec 2014 - Jan 2020
Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) API Client
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:3 releases, 220 commits, 36 PRs in 5 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Thomas's primary contribution appears to be related to the implementation and modification of methods for interacting with Amazon S3 buckets. Their work focuses on defining and modifying various functions within the package related to bucket management, including getting, deleting, and putting objects within the bucket. The commits indicate changes to the structure of these functions, including modifications to URL construction and handling responses. They have also made updates related to bucket versioning.
r-packageapiapi-clientamazonaws-s3
IQSS/dataverse
Sep 2015 - Jun 2017
Open source research data repository software
Role in this project:Technical Writer
Technical WriterContributions:7 commits, 3 PRs, 19 comments in 1 year 9 months
Contributions summary:Thomas primarily focused on improving and updating the Dataverse API documentation. They fixed typos, changed outdated references, and added new information about the API endpoints and client libraries. Their work included updating examples using `curl`, clarifying API key usage, and documenting the search API. This involved modifications to multiple API guide files.
research-datadata-repositoryopendataresearch-data-repositorycreative-commons
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWeâve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.