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.

Last updated May, 2023

Projects

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Featured Student Success Data Science Statistics Public Health

Project DA-FANH

Project DA-FANH works to retain and graduate highly qualified students while dismantling barriers and existing stereotypes. We aim to build a pathway for students of color in the intersection of Data Science/Data Analytics within food, agriculture, natural resources and human sciences (FANH) careers.

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

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 Initiative

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

DataFest

Annual weekend long undergraduate data challenge event. Friendly competition with food, fun and prizes.

DS POLS Twitter project

Missing Data

Project

Talks

Reducing costs, burden, and risk of human error in large scale survey data collection and Scope of Work reporting using Automation

Ongoing activities involving multiple stages or partner organizations–such as tracking survey participants or program subcontractor …
Feb 4, 2023
Code Slides

Resilience of Passion-Driven statistics in the face of Pandemic Online learning

This work analyzes trends from Sp19 to Fa21 (48 schools, 2,288 students), in student experiences and gains during the switch to online …
Nov 12, 2022
Slides

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
See all talks

Publications

Mariah Kornbluh, Jennifer Wilking, Susan Roll, Robin Donatello (2022). Exploring housing insecurity in relation to student success. Journal of American College Health.

Code DOI

Elizabeth Bianchini, Raymond Bogiatto, Robin A. Donatello, Michale Casazza, Joshua Ackerman, Susan DeLa Cruz, Troy Cline (2021). Host Correlates of Avian Influenza Virus Infection in Wild Waterfowl of the Sacramento Valley, California. Avian Diseases.

DOI

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.

See all publications

Ramblings

Guidelines for Creating a Good Scientific Poster

This post contains general guidelines on how to make a scientific poster. You should always check the standards and requirements for the specific conference, site or session where you will be presenting.
Last updated on Nov 26, 2022 9 min read professional

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
See all posts

Topics I talk about

automation avian-influenza basic-needs biology blogdown data-science dplyr DS Featured foreach ggplot hugo kable kable_extra Public-Health R Rmarkdown Statistics Student-Success teen-pregnancy-prevention