Data Champions Search

I'm a PhD student and Gates Cambridge Scholar studying psychology at St John's College. Broadly, I examine the psychometric properties of Internet big data; my current research explores how social media data predict personality traits and dimensions of mental illness. In general, I'm interested in social data science, the overlap of clinical disorders with everyday personality traits, and personality differences across cultures.

I provide Bioinformatic support for a few research groups in the Cambridge Stem Cell Institute. For the most part I deal with the analysis of single cell sequencing data, storage management of such data and the deployment of data processing pipelines into HPC environments.

I primarily work with large-scale language datasets, using methods from quantitative and computational social sciences, as well as the digital humanities. I also teach associated research methods, like statistics, data wrangling, and visualization. 

Outside my research, I am an active science communicator, primarily via two websites that I author: Effectiviology (https://effectiviology.com/), where I write about psychology and philosophy that have practical applications, and Solving Procrastination (https://solvingprocrastination.com/), where I write about what procrastination is, why we do it, and how to overcome it. 

As a Data Champion, I focus on the use of quantitative and computational methods for working with data (e.g., for data wrangling and statistical analyses). I also deal with associated topics, like maximizing the impact of research through open research and science communication. 

Karla’s PhD is about the level of energy services used in different countries with a focus on development. The research involves analysing country-level databases, performing statistical analyses and making visualisations. 

Karla holds a Bachelors’ degree in Chemical Engineering from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and an MSc from University College London (UCL). 

Karla’s professional experiences before the PhD included working for the non-alcoholic beverage industry in Mexico in the areas of quality, environment protection and operations management.