Born in Japan, grew up in America and Israel, having also lived in Germany, just returned from London, and currently residing in Tokyo. I’m quite proud to say that I am a citizen of the world!

Currently working for ACDI/VOCA, an international development NGO, as a Data Scientist. For the past 5 years I have been doing work as both a reporting analyst and a software developer in R and SQL to improve ACDI/VOCA’s data pipeline and create R packages, reproducible reports, dashboards, Shiny apps to communicate how our projects worldwide are progressing. I also manage our entire R code base that includes various ETL scripts, R packages, and software applications for data collection/management. I am also very involved in the R community (in Japan through Tokyo.R & internationally) through my volunteer work as an editor on the RWeekly newsletter (since April 2019). In 2020, I also did some work as a soccer analytics consultant for 11tegen11.

Interested in doing data analysis/visualization with R and SQL for NGOs, charities, non-profits (#DataForGood).

I have a MSc. in Industrial-Organizational and Business Psychology from the University College London (UCL). During the MSc. my main research interests were in consumer behavior, behavioral economics, and influencing/motivating behavioral change for the public good.

My interest in R comes from my belief in the need for more reproducibility and accountability in psychological and consumer research that can be attained by using R, GitHub, and other open-source software/tools to facilitate increased transparency between researchers and the general public. My main strengths in R are in creating data science tools (R packages, dashboards, data pipeline scripts), data wrangling, visualization, and more. Many examples of which you can see throughout my blog posts and my viz gallery!

You can learn a bit more about my hobby/work in R and in soccer analytics from interviews I did here and here.

Other interests/hobbies include Soccer/Football, Star Wars, and of course - Data Science!

Soccer Analytics ⚽🤓

  • soccer_ggplots repository: Collection of my soccer analytics blog posts & R code for data visualizations.
  • One of the authors of ggshakeR: Analytics & Visualization R Package for Soccer Data.

Author of R packages 💻🛠

  • tvthemes: ggplot2 themes & palettes based on your favorite TV shows.
  • bulletchartr: Create Bullet Charts For Visualizing KPIs.
  • centralperk: R Client For The “Friends” Quotes API.

Talks & Presentations

  • In July 2018, I gave a presentation at the TokyoR User Group on “Visualizing the World Cup with R!” - Check it out here!

  • Back in October 2019, I gave a presentation at the TokyoR User Group on a new version of the “bulletchartr” package - Check the slides out here!

  • In 2022, I co-hosted a webinar about “Managing Large Codebases in R!”

Contact me! 📫💬

Contact: ryonakagawara[at]gmail[dot]com

Connect with me on LinkedIn!

Follow Me on Twitter and/or Mastodon!

Current Location: Tokyo, Japan

Education

  • MSc Industrial-Organizational and Business Psychology: University College London, UK
    • Dissertation title: “Emoji and the Implicit Association Test for Uncovering Implicit Attitudes Toward Brands and Different Race Advertisement SpokesEmoji”
    • Supervisor: Dr. Dimitrios Tsivrikos
    • Abstract: “The present study combines the usage of the Implicit Association Test (IAT) in consumer research with emoji, a set of graphics used increasingly throughout computer-mediated communications including marketing and advertising messages. Study 1 demonstrates that emoji can be used as the valence attributes in a simple IAT categorization task. Study 2 goes further by demonstrating the convergent validity of the IAT using emoji valence attributes with explicit attitude measures in a situation where consumers had no reason to hide their beliefs. Study 3 demonstrated the contrast between explicit and implicit measures towards advertisements featuring Black and White skin tone emoji as advertisement spokespersons (SpokesEmoji) that revealed divergent responses in Black and White respondents. Overall, the results support the usage of pleasant and unpleasant emoji as IAT valence attributes. In addition, the IAT’s ability to test consumer attitudes toward different racial spokespersons represented by emoji is a benefit to researchers in marketing and advertising, an area where the usage of emoji continues to grow.”

  • BA Economics: Chapman University, USA

  • BA Psychology: Chapman University, USA

Skills

Technical skills

  • R:
    • Data wrangling (dplyr, plyr, tidyr, purrr, etc.): Example 1, 2, 3, 4
    • Sentiment analysis (tidytext, stringr): Example 1
    • Web scraping (rvest): Example 1
    • Statistics/Economics/Econometrics: 1
    • Package development: Maintainer & co-author of bulletchartr, Maintainer & author of tvthemes, co-author of various ACDI/VOCA internal packages
  • Graphical visualization:

  • Git/Github

  • SQL (MySQL)

  • Microsoft Access

  • SPSS

  • Amazon Mechanical Turk:
    • Build and manage different types of surveys and Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs)
    • Integrate with Inquisit Web Application for IAT tasks
  • Inquisit Lab 5:
    • Coding Implicit Association Test experiments for consumer psychology research

  • HTML + CSS (basic)

  • Javascript (basic)

Communication and teamwork skills

  • Bilingual: Japanese and English
  • I translate Japan.R and Tokyo.R Meetups and post roundup blogposts! JapanR 2018, TokyoR #76, TokyoR #77, TokyoR #78, TokyoR #79.
  • Work experience in a variety of cultures: Ghana, India, Germany, USA, Ireland, and Japan
  • Research Analyst in a National Science Foundation project while at Chapman University
    • Web Content Developer for communicating project progress and findings (as part of the OCT Group)
  • Football (soccer) player: Maccabi Herzliya U-15s, Sportfreunde Katernberg U-16s
  • Youth Football (Soccer) Coach in Ghana, India, and Japan: Under-9s to Under-14s
  • Marketing and Business Development Intern at RedNight Consulting
  • Volunteer Teacher in India: Reading comprehension, spelling, grammar, physical education
  • Blogging about data analysis using R