Hi! I'm a community health data analyst combining data science and nutrition expertise to support food access, mutual aid, and rural resilience in Iowa.

 Lauren

Charis

Athon

I build data tools and analysis workflows that help communities understand and act on their own health needs.

 

I hold a B.S. in Data Science from Graceland University in Lamoni, Iowa, where I live with my husband and young son and where my work is rooted. I also hold a B.S. in Food & Nutrition with a dietetic focus from the University of Alabama. This means I don't just work with health data; I understand what it means clinically, particularly around nutrition, food access, and patient outcomes.

 

Most of my project work concerns public health, food systems, and data visualization. I build things meant to be used by real people: interactive dashboards, reproducible analysis workflows, and tools designed for non-technical audiences who need to make decisions from complex data. Tableshed is the clearest example: an R Shiny application that turns public LiDAR, parcel, and soil data into a plain answer to a question a lot of people have about their own yard, and that no one was answering for them.

 

That pattern runs through most of what I do: public data exists, but it sits in formats and systems that keep it out of reach of the households it's about. I'm interested in the work of closing that gap, and in doing it locally enough that the people affected have a say in it.

 

That work is local as well as technical. I serve on the Lamoni Planning & Zoning Commission, where I'm building the city's parcel and zoning maps, and I'm involved in community sustainability efforts here, including a community garden I organized and an energy audit tool I'm building for local use.

 

I take on analysis, evaluation, and tool-building work in community health, food systems, and rural public health, especially in southern Iowa with organizations that have data but not the capacity to use it, and on tools that put public data back in the hands of the people it describes.

Interests: community health data · food systems & food security · rural resilience · public health nutrition · interactive visualization · reproducible workflows