Associate Teaching Professor, University of California, San Diego
Shannon Ellis is from Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, a suburb outside west Philadelphia. She attended her local public school, Upper Darby High School, known for being one of the biggest in the state (4,000+ students) and Tina Fey’s alma mater (thus the inspiration of Mean Girls). While she loved having so many academic and extracurricular options, she initially struggled to pin down her interests for college. Ultimately, largely in part to her AP Biology teacher Miss Hale, she decided to pursue biology as an undergraduate.
She went to King’s College—a small (2,400 students) liberal arts college in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania—where she earned a BS in biology and Spanish while playing two Division III NCAA sports. During her first year, her genetics professor, Jeramia Ory, overheard her saying she had an interest in research and asked if she was interested in doing research with him. She worked in his lab for four years and participated in a Research Experience for Undergraduates at Carnegie Mellon, which together solidified her interest in research. However, it also made her realize she needed to learn to code and deepen her knowledge of statistics in graduate school.
She pursued her PhD at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in human genetics in part because it required more statistics courses than other programs. “As I deepened my statistics knowledge and moved from the bench toward computation in Dan Arking’s lab, data science became a ‘thing,’” Ellis said. As she stared at her computer, writing code to carry out statistical analysis in a reproducible manner on large, heterogenous genomic data sets, it eventually became clear to her that she was doing data science, even if that’s not what they would have called it just a few years prior.
After finishing her PhD, Ellis joined Jeff Leek to work on genomics-focused projects. However, she found herself more interested in the data science education side of his group as she got started on that work. She let Leek know, and he dove in headfirst, supporting her on that path. In addition to gaining more traditional classroom experience, she was able to develop the curriculum and content behind Chromebook Data Science—a set of free, online courses to teach the basics of data science to individuals with no prior experience or extensive math background—and tutor their first set of learners (individuals in Baltimore who had previously earned their GED) through the curriculum. “This remains one of the most rewarding experiences of my career to date,” Ellis said.
Today, Ellis is an associate teaching professor in cognitive science at the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute at the University of California at San Diego, where she teaches data science, programming, and genetics to more than 1,000 undergraduate students each academic year and participates in research studying the effects of THC on driving and tobacco e-commerce retail practices. “I still write code and use statistics to carry out data analyses, but these days it’s just less genetics-focused … and most often in service of helping my students learn,” Ellis said.
Professionally, Ellis considers what her students go on to do in the world her greatest achievement. Personally, her family is her greatest achievement. She says, “My husband Josh and our son Kayden (2022) bring me so much joy and offer the support needed to have a successful career in academia and a great family life outside of it.”
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