By Tim Dennis published on Apr 29th, 2026
What we've been working on: Spring 2026
Spring quarter brought four new team members: Lian Elsa Linton (Project Manager), Shawn Wang, Audrey Garcia, and Gianna Kim. Connor Lim is still here, doing 3D scanning and spatial data work with Doug Daniels.
Here’s some of what we’ve been up to.
Client projects
Abigail Naranjo, a researcher with the Black/Latinx AIDS Project, is studying whether STEM and Humanities students at UCLA have the same awareness of campus sexual health resources. She came in with 143 survey responses and 10 interviews. Shawn, Lian, and Audrey are helping with the analysis.
Elena Dominguez’s Project Brainstorm course sent five neuroscience PhD student research teams our way this quarter. Their questions:
- Tucker Gruber and Katya Wardhana are using the PISA 2022 international education dataset to see whether inequality and government education spending predict learning gaps across different socioeconomic groups.
- Jisoo Hong is asking whether being an English Language Learner affects how California students score on the CAST science exam.
- Nicole and Farajh want to study flipped-classroom instruction in community colleges. We’re helping them design a survey and think through what statistical approach would actually answer their question.
- Isabella Torriani and Harleen Kaur are looking at whether students with ADHD respond differently to reward-based learning tasks, using a published open dataset from OpenNeuro.
Elizabeth Guevara and Gustavo Cardenas are MSW students at the Luskin School of Public Policy. Their capstone analyzes LAUSD’s Strategic Plan and what it delivered for foster youth. Their data comes from LAUSD’s own public reporting. Lian is connecting them with the team for the statistical work.
Shorter projects finished up too. One Political Science undergrad needed a specific graph to work in R – one meeting, done. A Public Health researcher needed help building a model to predict COPD outcomes. A Digital Humanities course needed visualization feedback across several student projects. And a researcher in the International Institute needed to bulk-download more than 1,200 declassified PDFs from the Israeli State Archives. The archive only lets you download one file at a time, so we wrote a script that handled the rest.
Building the UC OSPO Education site
The UC OSPO network brings together open source program offices across the University of California – groups that support researchers and students who want to learn about and contribute to open source software. They needed a website to collect and organize learning materials from across the campuses. Shawn Wang and Gianna Kim built it.
The lesson inventory had been living in a Google Sheet, which works until you try to keep a website in sync with a spreadsheet. Shawn moved the lessons into a proper editing system – one where a content editor can update a record without touching any code – then built individual pages for each lesson and wrote a small tool that catches discrepancies between the spreadsheet and what’s published. He also set up automated checks that run every time a change is submitted, so bad data doesn’t slip through.
Gianna built the search. It uses fuzzy matching, so if you type “Python data clean” you’ll still find “Data Cleaning with Python” rather than getting nothing. She also built the browse-by-pathway page, which groups lessons by learning goal, and cleaned up the lesson category labels across the full collection, which had gotten inconsistent over time.
The site launched with UC branding, a homepage that routes users two different ways depending on whether they know what they want or need help figuring that out, and a filterable lesson library with individual pages for every lesson. It went through a full accessibility review before launch. It’s at ucospo.net/education.
Work with us
DataSquad is based at the UCLA Library Data Science Center. If you’re working with data and could use a hand, schedule a consultation or stop by walk-in hours in Room 11630L at YRL, behind the sliding glass doors past the Collaboration Pods. Hours are on our website.