My name is Jonathan Lacanlale, and I was born and raised in Los Angeles, CA. I graduated in 2021 from
Cal State University, Northridge (CSUN) with a B.S. in Computer Science and Minor in Mathematics, and I'm currently
pursuing my Masters in Data Science at U.T. Austin.
As of March '24, I've been working full-time as an Analytics Engineer for the mission-driven non-profit known as Didi
Hirsch, which focuses on providing mental health services to all communities. Here, I'm fortunate to take both ownership
and creative ability in developing data tools that enable both clinical and internal teams to make data-driven decisions.
My long-term work passion is to pursue a career that focuses on working with data from a
technological and analytical perspective. I am continually cultivating this ambition into a data science-centered
career that will allow me to apply my professional skillset to missions that I believe in.
Throughout my career, I've been fortunate to work with multiple domains of data, varying from financial data,
biomedical research, image and videos, textual data, and even data fed from raw sensors. For each project
and position I've been involved in, I've had a large stake in both the technical and analytical work. This includes
ETL/ELT pipeline development, serving adhoc data requests through SQL, creating data visualizations/dashboards,
communicating data insights, and much more.
These experiences continue to lead me to pursue my passion in data-centric work and further support
my growth as a data scientist.
Published research project that focuses on utilizing machine learning models to enable ML feature type inference. The work I was fortunate to contribute to the lab heavily focused on gathering and cleaning data from multiple, disparate datasets, and processing these datasets to be used in training machine learning models. Many thanks to UCSD, the STARS research program, and Dr. Arun Kumar and his Data Analytics Lab for the opporutnity to do such work.
This was my first first-authored research project (as-in I was the lead in conducting experiments, writing the code, and writing the paper from draft-to- publication). The work outlined in this paper utilizes object detection methods taken from the field of computer vision. We use detection models to help quantify objects-of-interest (here, we count mosquitos) in an effort to support biomedical research.
This was a fun personal project to explore the athlete data collected by OpenPL. As a brief primer, OpenPL collects data from powerlifting meets, allowing for tracked and up-to-date data on powerlifters and the evergrowing niche community of powerlifting. As a powerlifter myself, I was curious as to how other people start out in the sport and what those numbers have looked like over the past few years.