Life and Times of a Data Scientist

Speaker: Virginia Wheway
Affiliation: HCF

Abstract

Virginia Wheway has spent over 30 years as a data scientist across several industries ; from aviation and mining to start ups and medical research. She now heads up HCFs Data Science function and will be sharing use cases and problems she’s worked on over the past 30 years. She will also explain the types of modelling and data science techniques that she use in her day-to-day work.

Biography

Virginia is an expert in analytics, data mining and developing business strategies for data and analytics functions. She has over thirty years’ experience across many industry sectors, including aviation, transport, mining, manufacturing, medicine, trading and now insurance.

Virginia helps businesses solve their problems through the use of analytics and data mining. She is skilled at converting business problems into solvable frameworks, and has the ability then to translate complex concepts into relevant business language and communicate this clearly. She has particular depth of experience in data visualisation, text data mining and developing new data analysis methodologies that can adapt to each organisation’s unique data. Virginia is currently the Head of Data Science at HCF where she leads the development of models into societal health trends and member behaviour. In the past 15 years she has set up the data and analytics functions in many organisations; from large companies such as BHP, to startups. She also spent thirteen years of her career with The Boeing Company, where she held the roles of research statistician, Chief Mathematician (Australia), and Director (Boeing Australia Holdings).  Virginia also previously led the NSW government’s Bureau of Transport Statistics, where she had responsibility for leading a team of over 50 analysts and initiating projects such as visualizing public transaction data, measuring fare evasion and establishing an organisation-wide analytics strategy.