Quantitative Analysis

Finley Golightly

IT Support & Helpdesk Supervisor
Applied Mathematics

Finley has been with D-Lab since Fall 2020, formerly as part of the UTech Management team before joining as full-time staff in Fall 2023. They love the learning environment of D-Lab and their favorite part of the job is their co-workers! In their free time, they enjoy reading, boxing, listening to music, and playing Dungeons & Dragons. Feel free to stop by the front desk to ask them any questions or just to chat!

Filtering, Visualizing, and Interpreting Spatial Time Series Data

December 17, 2025
Maksymilian Jasiak
by Maksymilian Jasiak. Spatial time series (consecutive measurements across space and time) are often difficult to interpret, especially when there are many overlapping signals. However, have no fear! Filtering and visualizing can help better interpret and understand the spatial time series data.

A Practical Guide to Shift-Share Instruments (and What I Learned Replicating the China Shock)

November 26, 2025
Jiayu Lai
by Jiayu Lai. Shift-share instruments are among the most widely used tools in applied economics, appearing in labor, trade, immigration, and policy evaluation research. But despite their popularity, many researchers still use them as black boxes — and risk invalid instruments as a result. In this blog post, I unpack how shift-share IVs actually work, why their validity depends on both the “shifts” and the “shares,” and what practical steps researchers should take to check assumptions. I also walk through how I used the Borusyak–Hull–Jaravel (2022, 2025) framework to reproduce the seminal Autor, Dorn, and Hanson (2013) China shock analysis.

Sahiba Chopra

Data Science Fellow 2024-2025
Haas School of Business

I'm a PhD student in the Management and Organizations (Macro) group at Berkeley Haas. I have a diverse professional background, primarily as a data scientist across numerous industries, including fintech, cleantech, and media. I hold a BA in Economics from the University of Maryland, an MS in Applied Economics from the University of San Francisco, and an MS in Business Administration from UC Berkeley.

My research focuses on the intersection of inequality, technology, and the labor market. I am particularly interested in understanding how to reduce inequality in...

Call for Excel Fellow

In Silico Approach to Mining Viral Sequences from Bulk RNA-Seq Data

October 28, 2025
Carly Karrick
by Carly Karrick. Viruses play important roles in evolution and influence ecosystems and host health. However, isolating and studying them can be difficult. In lieu of using resource-intensive methods to concentrate viruses into a “virome,” bulk sequencing methods include data from all biological entities present in a sample. In this tutorial, we explore an approach to mine viral sequences from publicly available bulk RNA-Seq data. The output from this analysis paves the way for future statistical analyses comparing viral communities in different contexts. This approach can be applied to other datasets, including studies of human health.

Python Data Wrangling and Manipulation with Pandas

October 19, 2021, 10:00am
Pandas is a Python package that provides fast, flexible, and expressive data structures designed to make working with 'relational' or 'labeled' data both easy and intuitive. It enables doing practical, real world data analysis in Python. In this workshop, we'll work with example data and go through the various steps you might need to prepare data for analysis.

Skyler Yumeng Chen

Data Science & AI Fellow 2025-2026, Data Science for Social Justice Fellow 2024
Haas School of Business

Skyler is a Ph.D. student in Behavioral Marketing at the Haas School of Business. Her research centers on consumer behavior and judgment and decision-making, with a keen interest in both experimental methods and data science techniques. She holds a B.A. in Economics and a B.S. in Data Science from New York University Shanghai.

Decision-Making Under Pressure during My PhD: Lessons from whale songs and ocean noise

May 6, 2025
Jaewon Saw
by Jaewon Saw. This blog post shares a story from a field experiment using Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) to detect whale vocalizations in Monterey Bay. Most of the data got overwhelmed by noise from boat engines, wave motion, and cable instability. On the final day, a spur-of-the-moment decision to add loops to the fiber optic cable dramatically improved signal quality.

Which Coin Should I Flip? The Multi-Arm Bandit

February 4, 2025
Bruno Smaniotto
by Bruno Smaniotto. Consider the following game: You are given the option to choose between two coins to flip. These coins are possibly biased, so the probability of getting Heads for each coin might differ from 50/50. Each time that you flip Heads, you win one dollar. There are a total of 10 rounds. Which coin should you flip at each round? In this blog post, we will analyze this problem through the lens of a famous decision-making algorithm called the Multi-Arm Bandit, exploring how to structure the problem mathematically and how it can be solved for particular examples.