R-Ladies is a global organization which promotes gender minorities in the programming and coding community. Knowing that individuals from biology to psychology to environmental science use R as a tool among others, R-Ladies Louisville seeks to connect our local R users (or individuals curious about learning R!) across disciplines in professional development surrounding coding practices and techniques. Since our founding we have relied mainly on virtual workshops which have had a lot of success, reaching over 3000 graduate students, faculty, research scientists, and even medical professionals from around the world looking to learn more about coding. Co-founders Ann Holmes (U of L alumna) and Lauren Girouard-Hallam (PhD candidate, Experimental Psychology) are hoping to engage directly with the Louisville community to get local R users and/or coding enthusiasts involved in event planning, workshop hosting, and driving our mission to support those traditionally underrepresented in the R community. Please join us: all are welcome! 

Presenter: Lauren Girouard-Hallam and Ann Holmes

Lauren Girouard-Hallam is an experimental psychology PhD candidate at the University of Louisville in Louisville, KY. She studies how children aged 3-12 use technology such as Alexa, Google, and the internet to enhance their understanding of the world. You can learn more about her work and publications here.  

Beyond her academic pursuits, Lauren serves as the chair of the American Psychological Association's Science Student Council. Additionally, Lauren contributes to "Corners," an educational blog focused on teaching strategies, led by the Society for the Teaching of Psychology (STP)'s graduate student teaching assistant steering committee and is a contributing author for CogBites, a #SciComm blog devoted to simply explaining cutting-edge cognitive science for the general public. Lauren also develops programming and streamlines logistics as an organizing committee head for ComSciCon, an annual science communication conference created for and by graduate students. Her workshop on engaging with science communication as a trainee was recently chosen as a Feature Stage presentation at APA's annual conference.     

Lauren and her colleague Ann Holmes recently received a SIPS commendation for their work simulating dataset from real-world DEI-based psychology articles for the graduate statistics classroom. This TA experience has also garnered Lauren and Ann a featured mainstage presentation at STP's annual conference on teaching (ACT) and a workshop at the Midwestern Psychological Association conference. In addition, they both bring free workshops on basic statistics to gender minoritized community members through the R-Ladies Louisville chapter that have reached over 1,000 participants to date.   

Lauren cares deeply about undergraduate students, particularly first-generation students. Along with other current and former members of the SSC, Lauren co-leads workshops on strategies for getting into psychology graduate school programs that have reached nearly 3,000 undergraduates. She and close collaborator Megan Norris have also designed a curriculum for engaging undergraduate students in the research lab experience.  

Ann Holmes, MS (she/her/hers) is currently a data scientist with Vanderbilt University Medical Center working on large scale NIH-supported initiatives to increase accessibility of omics data for special populations. She graduated from U of L with her MS in Experimental Psychology where she co-founded R-Ladies with her colleague Lauren Girouard-Hallam. She and Lauren also developed statistics materials in RMarkdown and have since been advocates for free and open-source software across academia and industry. Their work received a commendation from the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science as well as teaching and service awards within the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences at U of L.