Featured Authors March 2021: Women Edition

Women’s History Month has been observed for over 100 years as a way to celebrate female activists, professionals, athletes, and artists. It recognizes their achievements throughout history and offers an opportunity to shine a light on the obstacles faced by women around the world. By celebrating women in March, we hope to drive awareness of these issues and provide the necessary tools for women in the tech industry to help uplift one another.

With that in mind, we want to recognize the amazing work of some of these women who inspire others within our community. Please allow us to introduce our newest group of Featured Authors:

Alice McKnight is inspired to dive deeper into data analytics and the benefits of creating engaging stories with data. She participates in a variety of community-led initiatives including #MakeoverMonday, #DiversityinData, and #RealWorldFakeData and hopes to continue documenting her growth on Tableau Public and leveraging visual analytics skills in her work as a public health professional.

Alicia Gámez Belmonte is a Data Analyst and Tableau is one of the main tools she depends on in her work. She uses her Twitter account to connect and share with the #DataFam Community. Alicia enjoys creating visualizations on different topics that allow her to learn new things and challenge herself—hence her assiduous participation in #MakeoverMonday.

Alisha Dhillon is a trainee consulting analyst at the Information Labrealized where she enjoys helping others make sense of their data. She realized just how much she enjoys working with Tableau while creating her first vizzes on the ethnic disproportionality in the criminal justice system and hate crime. By allowing her to make something that’s incredibly difficult to convey, come to life and be understood by all and creates visualizations on topics that inspire her.

Anastasiia Komissarova —“Data visualization enables us to ‘rediscover’ the world and see in action the power and beauty of mathematics”. Anastasiia discovered Tableau last year while working as a market analyst for an non-profit organization. She fell in love with data visualization as the perfect combination of art and science that can serve human good, too. Topics of interest to her include gender equality, international conflicts, and climate change.

Dinushki De Livera is a business analyst at Unifund and an adjunct professor at the University of Cincinnati. To connect data professionals everywhere, especially women, she co-founded Her Data with friend and colleague, Jennifer Dawes. She is also a Tableau User Group leader for the Cincinnati Tableau User Group and loves being involved with the #DataFam community to learn, be inspired by others and share her knowledge and skills.

Duygu Unaldi is a customer insight analyst at Ticketmaster and uses Tableau in her role. She also loves art, graphic design, and photography which makes data visualization interesting to her because it combines her engineering aptitude for data analysis with creativity. She is a member of the #DataFam via Twitter which speeds up her learning process and an active #MakeoverMonday participant.

Frances Okolo is a Tableau Desktop Certificate Specialist and Doctoral Researcher in Information Management at Loughborough University. Her background includes Computer Science and Big Data in Business. She loves creating visualizations focused on public health and economics in Africa, and volunteers on #VizforSocialGood projects. Tableau Public provides her limitless inspiration from other data enthusiasts, and a space to develop visualization skills and share her work.

Joti Gautam is a technology analyst at Infosys and actively participates in community-led projects like #MakeoverMonday and #DiversityinData. She focuses on a combination of visual metaphor and compelling data narrative to create intuitive visualizations that can create an instant human connection. She credits the source of her inspiration and learnings to the #DataFam community—a very supportive and positive environment.

Krishma Shah is a product manager and data journalist at ADP DataCloud where she develops compelling data dashboards. She’s an active member of the #DataFam and loves Tableau Public because it gives her creative freedom while performing data analytics to convey insights.

Lilla Rasztik is a senior data analyst at EPAM. Tableau Public has provided her a platform where she can share her endeavors through storytelling and design, and helped her engage with a great, like-minded community. She enjoys creating vizzes related to life sciences, user behavior, plants, traveling, and yoga. Embedding is an important feature since it allows her to integrate her work with her curiousanalyst.io blog.

Lisa Rapp is a business intelligence consultant at INFOMOTION and is very passionate about data literacy and developed training courses and programs to help companies become more data-driven. The amazing support of the #DataFam helped her be more creative, apply new techniques, and improve her data viz skills. She hopes to further enhance her data storytelling, design, and UX skills by joining more community projects such as #IronQuest and #ProjectHealthViz.

Madalina Andrei is a business intelligence analyst at UiPath, in Bucharest, where she develops modern business dashboards for C-level executives. Inspired by the incredible community, she helped Sergiu Rotaru empower a small Romanian tribe that encourages people to create visualizations using Romanian data and raise awareness. Madalina credits her growth to inspiration from the community.

Rika Fujiwara is a data analyst in Japan and is fascinated by Tableau Public’s potential to be practical and artistic. She enjoys creating data visualizations with Tableau for business and pleasure and participates in #MakeoverMonday and #Viz5. She has learned from the brilliant work of other Tableau Public community members and is passionate about becoming a better creator. The topics she focuses on are gender equality and education.

It's been amazing to see how the community has come together to celebrate the remarkable achievements women have made throughout history and how data visualizations have impacted the way these stories are told.

As March comes to a close, we hope we can continue to elevate this conversation going forward and all year long. Don’t forget to follow and get inspired by this exceptional group of women in data! Pro tip: Subscribing to Viz of the Day is a great way to find your next favorite viz author.

If you are looking for extra inspiration, read this Women Love Tech blog post from two Tableau Community members, Kimly Scott and Amy Tran.