Robin Sifre

Data Scientist, Manager

EarliTec Diagnostics

About Me

I'm a Data Scientist at EarliTec Diagnostics, where I manage an amazing team developing products that will make early autism diagnosis and treatment accessible to children everywhere. In my role I get to design and implement our data processing pipeline, design quantitative analysis plans for clinical trials, and lead data science projects to both improve our existing products and explore future product opportunities.

I have a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota's Institute of Child Development. My research interests include brain and behavioral development, visual attention, and quantitative psychology.

I fell in love with research at Brown University, where I did my honors thesis on the different cognitive processes that impact how we make decisions. During my senior year I discovered the world of infant attention, and become obsessed with figuring out how babies learn to make sense of the visually complex world. That led me to a stint at Emory University where I studied how differences in visual attention impact social and cognitive development in infants later diagnosed with autism.

Download my CV, and my resume.

Interests

Data science
Model Development
Psychology
Data visualization
Eye-tracking
Brain development
Psychometrics

Education

PhD in Developmental Science, 2021
Institute of Child Development, University of Minnesota
B.S. in Cognitive Neuroscience, 2014
Brown University

Skills

python

I write code in python for product development.

R

I clean and analyze data in R, and love RMarkdown for sharing results.

Statistics

Longitudinal data analysis, multi-level modeling, time series

Teaching & Leadership

Course instructor for Intro to Psychology, Graduate Student Representative

Programming

MATLAB, Python, R, and Java

Eye tracking

I develop medical devices that leverage eye-tracking tech.

Experience

Manager, Data Science

EarliTec Diagnostics

Jul 2022 – Present

I lead a time of data scientists in developing eye-tracking data processing pipelines and diagnostic models for a medical device that makes early autism diagnosis accessible to children everywhere.

Data Scientist

EarliTec Diagnostics

Aug 2021 – Jul 2022

Data Scientist & Statistician

TransYouth Project, Princeton University

Dec 2020 – Jul 2021

I provided stats consultations for the TransYouth Project. I also designed a logical and clear data data organizational structure for a 20-year-long study, and built data cleaning pipelines in R.

Graduate Student Representative

University of Minnesota Twin Cities

Sep 2019 – Jun 2020 Minneapolis, MN

I held town hall listening sessions to understand ways in which graduate students would like to see program improvements.
I then worked with administration to implement positive change, with the goal of improving the effectiveness of graduate training.

Course Instructor

University of Minnesota Twin Cities

Jan 2019 – May 2019 Minneapolis, MN

Taught Introduction to Psychology to class of 25 college students.

PhD Candidate

University of Minnesota Twin Cities

Sep 2016 – May 2021 Minneapolis, MN

My program of research is multi-disciplinary, and spans the fields of Child Psychology, Neuroscience, and Computational Psychiatry.
During my Ph.D. I've worked on multiple collaborative teams, both leading projects and serving as a statistical consultant. My work has been published in multiple academic journals, and presented at international conferences.

My research projects include:

Applying machine learning to develop low-cost screeners for developmental disorders.
Collecting and analyzing functional MRI data to model brain connectivity in infants.
Evaluating survey data with factor analysis.

Research Scientist

Marcus Autism Center, Emory University

Jul 2014 – Jul 2016 Atlanta, Georgia

Worked in Social Neuroscience Lab collecting and analyzing eye-tracking data from infants and children with autism spectrum disorders.
Led project on early attention markers of ASD through conceptualization, analysis, and writing.
Results were published in peer-reviewed journal and presented at international research conferences.