Colby oversees the data science and visualization consultation service, leads the Data Science Research Consultants Student Program, creates and teaches Python workshops, and collaborates with faculty and researchers on data science projects. Highlights of her project work include improving an algorithm to run 60 times faster for a research collaboration between the Center for Epidemiology and Population Health and the Enterprise Data Warehouse at Northwestern Medicine; automating the data pipeline for a research lab to eliminate many manual steps; and providing custom, thoughtful analyses and visualizations from survey data for the Center for Leadership/McCormick School of Engineering and Northwestern IT.
The Python Fundamentals Bootcamps and Next Steps in Python workshops she created and teaches have been attended by thousands of NU community members. Colby also developed the BYOD (Bring Your Own Data) program that brings together researchers in small groups to motivate each other on their data projects. She supervises and mentors a team of talented undergraduate and graduate students who conduct one-on-one consultations with researchers, assist on faculty projects, and teach their own data science and programming workshops.
Colby is a member of the Northwestern IT Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee, has presented to the Research Data Access and Preservation Association (RDAP) and the Campus Research Computing Consortium (CaRCC), and has served as a Women in Data Science (WiDS) Chicago Datathon mentor. She teaches other instructors how to develop training materials for workshops on programming and computational topics, both at the Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing (PEARC) Conference and at Northwestern. Colby’s own research background is in plant biology and comparative genomics, and she has both a BA and MS from Northwestern University.