Rachel Wilkerson

Education

Ph.D., Statistics, University of Warwick (in progress)

M.Sc., Complexity Science, University of Warwick

B.A., University Scholars, Baylor University

The Award

Rachel was awarded a Goldwater Scholarship during her time at Baylor. The Goldwater Scholarship is awarded to college students who intend to pursue research careers in natural science, mathematics, and engineering.

At Baylor

Dr. Rachel Wilkerson joined the Baylor Engineering and Computer Science faculty as a Lecturer of Data Science. She earned a PhD in Statistics at the University of Warwick studying causality in graphical models. Rachel worked as a data scientist in the civic sector for ten years. She designs human-centric data models attune to the realities of complex systems. She also holds a M.Sc. in Complexity Science from the University of Warwick. During her time as a University Scholar at Baylor, Rachel studied mathematics and received a Goldwater Scholarship for research in nonlinear dynamics. An open data advocate, Rachel contributes regularly to the R community and volunteers for DataKind. Her most memorable data cleaning experience was working on spectroscopy data for a globular cluster of stars at the McDonald Observatory in far West Texas. 

During her time at Baylor, Rachel volunteered at the Gospel Cafe and with the physics department at Mission Waco to cook breakfast for the homeless. She also had an internship at the McDonald Overservator near Fort Davis, Texas. Rachel has worked with Dr. Jeffrey Olafsen to conduct research on nonlinear dynamical systems. learn about new programming languages, and explore the basics of chaos theory.