From designing experiments to analysing candidates’ scores in postgraduate medical examinations, I have 15 over years’ experience of building stories with data. I have earned a solid reputation for making complex things easy to understand, through clear communication and intuitive data visualisations.
Being personally approached by the largest Medical Royal College in the UK was one of the highlights of my career to date. But no matter the scale of the work, the real joy lies in seeing faces light up when something obscure becomes plain, when a process that took days is reduced to minutes, and when people feel confident in their understanding of their own data.
Whether you’re after a polished dataviz, a clear data-driven story, or a report that updates itself whenever you feed it new information, I’d love to help you make the most of that pile of data you have sitting in a corner somewhere. (Don’t worry if it’s a bit of a mess, I can help with that too!)
Recent projects for charities, businesses and research groups have involved:
- Data wrangling - Replacing a convoluted manual Copy-Paste workflow across multiple Excel spreadsheets with a script that reads in the data and tidies everything up at the press of a button, ready for analysis
- Data analysis - Replicating complex analyses using a range of statistical methods in R and automating the reporting of outcomes
- Data visualisation - Finding creative ways to engage readers with a need or a research outcome highlighted in the data
- Data-driven story telling - Helping a local charity build a narrative around its fundraising need to help potential donors visualise how they could contribute
- Bespoke graph themes - Ensuring datavisualisations are aligned with the aesthetic of the client’s web page or other key resources
- Education and coaching - Working with clients to help them understand the code and providing guidance on data management
- “Agile” development - Responding to further development needs as projects have grown in scope over time
Great, how does that work?
First, get in touch. The easiest way is email: cara.r.thompson@gmail.com.
We’ll discuss your context and your data needs and make a plan from there. I charge a standard hourly rate, and will provide you with an estimated completion time based on the details of the project.
If you have an R user in your group, I can help them get to grips with the code as part of the project. Once a project is finished, the code is yours if you’d like to keep building on it!
And how did you end up doing this?
For a more standard take on career progression, check out my LinkedIn profile.