Superbloom

Reshama Shaikh

Statistician, Open Source Advocate and Founder, Data Umbrella

Reshama Shaikh

Reshama Shaikh is a statistician, data scientist and open source advocate. She has more than 14 years experience as a biostatistician and over 10 years experience as a community manager. She holds a Masters in Statistics from Rutgers University and an MBA with a focus on business analytics, strategy and marketing from New York University Stern School of Business.

She began her statistical career at Educational Testing Service. She then worked for over 10 years as a biostatistician in the pharmaceutical industry at various companies including PPD, Merck, Thomas Jefferson University and Pfizer, covering Phase I through Phase 4 clinical trials. She also taught math, statistics and Rstats, and has given more than a dozen workshops on Using Git for Open Source for the community.

She founded Data Umbrella in 2019, a community to expand the participation of open source users and contributors in the data science space. Prior to that, she served in a key leadership role with Women in Machine Learning and Data Science for 5 years, expanding the community globally from 3 chapters to 100 and was the lead organizer for the New York City chapter of PyLadies, which is the third largest chapter worldwide.

She is an open source contributor to a number of projects and on the teams for scikit-learn (the most popular python machine learning library) and PyMC (a probabilistic python programming language). 

Reshama has written numerous community blogs, given presentations and tutorials on data science, community and open source and mentored others in the community. 

Her community manager certifications include: 

She has a wide range of skills and expertise including: statistics, data science, coding in Python and R, teaching, open source, strategy and community. Reshama is an experienced community manager, with expertise in open source, diverse and inclusive practices and working with global teams.

She was awarded the Community Leadership Award from NumFOCUS in 2019, and became a Python Software Foundation Fellow in 2022.