Robin Donatello

Robin Donatello

Associate Professor of Statistics and Data Science

California State University, Chico

About me

When I’m not on campus, typically i’m growing 🥕🌾🍅🍆🍏 for my family, out adventuring with my 🐶🧔🐩 , or getting some 🎮🎲📚 time in.

Campus life consists of:

  • Teaching the next generation of Scientists how to harness the power of Statistics and Data in a responsible and ethical manner.
  • Providing Statistical consulting and analytical support for many projects on and off campus.
  • Supporting students in their academic adventures through intensive advising and research.
  • Leading the Data Science Initative (DSI) to develop Data Science capacity on our campus.

Interests

  • Racial Equity in STEM
  • Data Science
  • Student Success
  • Data Editing and Imputation
  • Gardening for food
  • Pitbulls and puppies
  • Being outdoors

Education

  • Dr. P.H. in Biostatistics, 2013

    Fielding School of Public Health, University of California, Los Angeles

  • MS in Biostatistics, 2007

    Fielding School of Public Health, University of California, Los Angeles

  • BS in Mathematics, Option in Statistics, 2005

    California State University, Chico

  • BS in General Biology, Minor in Chemistry, 2005

    California State University, Chico

Contact

Teaching

I teach the following courses at Chico State,

And have created, curated, or contributed to the following teaching materials, most of which (textbook excepted) are licenced under CC-BY-NC.

  • That book –>
  • Curated data sets Wherever possible I try to use real world, non pre-processed data in the classroom.
  • Applied Statistics Notebook A compilation of Applied Statistics lecture notes using Bookdown that I use in multiple classes. Most of the examples are in R, some SPSS instructions or links to SPSS help pages sprinkled throughout.

Last updated Aug, 2021

Projects

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Featured Student Success Data Science Statistics Public Health

Adolescent and School Health

Los-Angeles based research group implementing school-based teen pregnancy prevention programs

Center for Healthy Communities

Working to help hungry students get the nutritious food they need to stay healthy and succeed.

Institutional Learning through Empirical Assessment and Researching iNterventions

The iLEARN project will initiate a systematic, institutional approach to assessing the impact of programs on student success.

Sustaining Success in Chemistry

This project enhances a current Sustaining Success project designed to improve student performance in Chemistry 111 (increased GPA, decrease DWF rate) by providing a deeper look at the characteristics of who takes this course, and who passes this course.

Passion Driven Statistics - Statistics to support science

Passion-Driven Statistics (PDS) is an introductory, project-based model that gets students hooked on the excitement and power of quantitative research. I am a site partner for the PDS grant, and have been using this pedagogy in Math 315 since Spring 2018. Click the PDF link below to see a poster I presented at the Joint Math Meetings

PMA6

This is the sixth edition of a popular textbook on multivariate analysis.

Deep Learning

Using Convolutional Neural Networks as a method of automatic data entry of PDF paper surveys

Bariatric study of ginger

College of Natural Sciences Poster Session

Streamlining abstract submission, processing, and judging for the annual College Poster Session at CSU, Chico. Pipeline uses Google Forms, R, Markdown, Sweave, LaTeX, GitHub, and Shiny.

Community Coding

Drop-in open work environment for anyone working on anything coding or data related. Students, staff, faculty, and the public are welcome. Summer hours now posted.

Data Science Initative

The Data Science Initative (DSI) at Chico State is an interdisiplinary community that provides support and training for Data Science endeavors.

DataFest

DS POLS Twitter project

EMPI

Housing Insecurity

Missing Data

Project

Talks

Promote Yourself: Make Your Own Professional Website Without Knowing HTML.

Data analysts tend to write a lot of reports, describing their analyses and results, for their collaborators or to document their work …
Jan 8, 2020 San Diego, CA
Slides

The Current State of Data Science at Chico State

Prof. Donatello will talk about the current state of Data Science at Chico State, including a description a few Data Science courses, …
Mar 3, 2018 American River College, Sacramento, CA
Slides

Examining the Effect of a Pedagogical Change in a High Failure Rate College Science Course in the Face of a Shifting Demographic Student Body

This project enhances a current current Sustaining Success project designed to improve student performance in Chemistry 111 (increased …
Jul 29, 2017 — Aug 3, 2017
Code Slides

Publications

Sherry Fox, Gema A. Knipe, Robin A. Donatello (2020). Deliberate practice in simulation - Evaluation of repetitive code training on nursing students' BLS team skills. Clinical Simulation in Nursing.

Abdelmonem A. Afifi, Susanne J. May, Robin A. Donatello, Virginia A. Clark (2019). Practical Multivariate Statistics 6th ed.. ISBN: 9781138702226.

PDF Code

Nissen, J., Donatello, RA., Van Dusen, B. (2019). Missing data and bias in physics education research; A case for using multiple imputation. Physical Review Physics Education Research.

PDF Code Slides DOI

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Ramblings

Rebuilding this Site, Again, from Near Scratch

The last time I updated this website was in 2017 [link to other post]. I’m taking a full year sabbatical, and so I wanted to start by doing some updates to this site first.
Last updated on Jun 24, 2020 9 min read

Using dplyr and foreach to read in multiple data sets from disk

I had a student (Jack Fogliasso) bring me a problem from a Microbiology lab where they are trying to identify bacteria using lasers. One of the items they wanted to understand was the absorption rates of different wavelengths.
Last updated on Jun 24, 2020 4 min read efficiency, programming

Getting Started with R and R Studio

Overview Instructions and links for downloading and installing the R Studio suite of awesomeness. Includes a brief walkthrough of R Studio R – The programming language. R Studio – A fantastic interface for coding in R.
Last updated on Jun 24, 2020 5 min read programming
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Topics I talk about

biology blogdown data-science dplyr DS Featured foreach ggplot hugo kable kable_extra LaTeX MICE missing data Public-Health R Rmarkdown Statistics Student-Success teen-pregnancy-prevention