I’m the Deputy Director of the ChildStat Data Unit in the Office of Research and Analytics at the New York City Administration for Children’s Services. I work on a team that generates outcome measures and performance indicators for investigations of child abuse and neglect from internal administrative databases. I have created an automated and reproducible workflow to query our databases, aggregate and summarize metrics, and create HTML and PDF dashboards, reports, and presentations from the data. Our team also collaborates with managers of frontline child protection staff to interpret this data in order to create actionable quality improvement plans and assess the impact of these plans. During the Covid-19 pandemic, I developed an “Early Alert Dashboard” that tracks week-to-week changes in child protection metrics and is used by senior leadership at the agency.
I like using the R programming language. I’m a co-author of the tidycensus R package, that makes it easy to download US Census and American Community Survey data using the Census web API. I also developed nycgeo, an R package that contains spatial data files for various geographic and administrative boundaries in New York City. Recently, I built a Covid-19 tracking site for Westchester County, NY.
Before I began working at ACS, I spent five years recording oral histories with StoryCorps and helped to open a butcher shop and salumeria called Ends Meat. I received my B.A. in American Studies from Columbia University in 2006 and my M.S. in Applied Social Research from Hunter College in 2018. Check out my resume for more details.
I live in Katonah, NY with my wife, Jaime, daughters, Maya and Tessie, and cats, Isabella and Walter. Get in touch at mfherman@gmail.com.
Latest posts
- May, 2020
- Custom sorting of strings in DT with an invisible column
- Using the SearchPanes extension with DT
- Jan, 2020
- Use patchwork and R Markdown for multi-image slide layouts in PowerPoint
