Drake Gibson

Affiliation: US Department of Homeland Security
Education: BA, Economics; Master’s, Applied Economics, University of Maryland

Drake Gibson grew up in Fort Washington, Maryland, and is a lifelong Prince George’s County, Maryland, resident. He graduated from the University of Maryland, College Park, with a BS in economics in 2013 and a master’s in applied economics in 2015.

Gibson’s interest in statistics came from his family and economics. He says, “I was never the best in my house at anything. My dad was good at math and history, my mom was great at writing and leading, and my sister was great at almost everything. They were the ones who made room for me to learn from them.”

His foray into data science came from the application of statistics to economics. He learned and began programming in R and Python in graduate school. At the Bureau of Labor Statistics, he says, “I took on projects with data analytics and leveraged that into data science before I even knew much of the field.” His coworkers then encouraged him to apply to be a data scientist (operations research analyst) in 2019, and he started in 2020. “Economics taught me how to wade into diverse disciplines, but statistics gave me a path to apply and lean into doing things I genuinely enjoy,” he says.

During Gibson’s time at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, he learned about record linkage, classifying text with unsupervised and supervised machine learning models, and how to lead a multidisciplinary team. This opportunity pushed him into a world he never knew existed and gave him opportunities he never thought he would have. “As I continue my career, I plan to learn as much as possible and become a better leader and data scientist,” he says. He currently leads a team of skilled data scientists and hopes to guide and learn from them.

With help from his support system, Gibson had the confidence to apply himself and grow into this new field. His proudest moment is being one of the first data scientists at the Bureau of Labor Statistics and presenting his work at the R Government Conference at Georgetown University in December of 2022.