Colin Douglas.

colindougl.as/cv
me@colindougl.as
linkedin.com/in/colinddouglas

My name is Colin. I have a biochemistry-ish Ph.D. and I really like the R programming language. I’ve made a career of poking around in big data sets and telling stories that decision-makers find interesting.

EXPERIENCE

Canadian Digital Service (Remote/Ottawa, ON)
Senior Advisor, Strategic Data and Reporting, October 2024 - Present

I currently work at the Canadian Digital Service. They do really good work in digital transformation space. I am helping them organize their data and tell stories about the aforementioned good work.

Public Services and Procurement Canada (Remote/Ottawa, ON)
Senior Data Scientist, February 2022 - October 2024
Data Scientist, November 2020 - February 2022

I was the primary data scientist for various incarnations of what was once called the Pay Administration Branch. I used the R programming language to help people understand whether the policies they were implementing were working.

I spent the first half of my tenure at Pay doing short- and medium-term time series modelling, on the scale of weeks to months. These forecasts fed into reporting upwards to the DM level and outwards to operational units. I provided guidance on things like resource determiniation, productivity measurements, and measuring the labour involved in individual pieces of work.

The second half of my time working at Pay, I used agent-based modelling to simulate the pay system and help forecast the long-term impact of certain policy and budget decisions. Although this was a modelling-heavy project, I also spent a lot of my time explaining my work to smart-but-not-technical people. My contributions were an important part of the Pay Program’s budget requests and consistently resulted in favourable funding decisions.

I also spent a lot of time advocating for the adoption of open source software (especially the R ecosystem) for making analyses reproducible. I have a lot of strong opinions on it and would love to talk to you about it! I have presented on the subject many times to many different government audiences, and you can see an example presentation here: Using R for Reproducible Reporting.

Precision Biologic Inc. (Dartmouth, NS)
Research and Development Scientist
June 2017 - November 2020

I helped develop and clear two medical devices:

Faculty of Medicine, Dalhousie University (Halifax, NS)
Killam Postdoctoral Fellow
April 2015 - May 2017

I studied mechanism-based inhibitors of enolase enzymes. In one project, I used multivariate non- linear curve fitting to suss out the different steps in an inhibition mechanism, and demonstrated that one molecule we worked with was the tightest known inhibitor of it’s target enzyme.

EDUCATION

University of Toronto, Toronto, ON
Ph.D., Biological and Organic Chemistry
Supervisor: Dr. Deborah Zamble
Thesis: Metal Specificity in [NiFe] Hydrogenase Maturation Proteins

St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, NS
B.Sc., Chemistry
Supervisor: Dr. Truis Smith-Palmer
Thesis: “Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy of Microbiological Systems”

POSTERS, PRESENTATIONS, AND PAPERS


AWARDS AND RECOGNITION

2023 ADM Achievement Award, Pay Administration Branch
2021 ADM Achievement Award, HR-to-Pay Program Office
2015 - 2017 Killam Postdoctoral Fellowship, Dalhousie University
2010 - 2013 Alexander Graham Bell Scholarship, (CGS-D), NSERC
2009 - 2010 Alexander Graham Bell Scholarship, (CGS-M), NSERC
2005 - 2009 Philip W. Oland Scholarship, St. Francis Xavier University

OPEN SOURCE CONTRIBUTIONS

  description role
bcsxp an R package for reading ASCII data from Siemens BCS XP coagulation analyzers creator, maintainer
retrosheet an R package for importing historical baseball data from retrosheet.org maintainer

TECHNICAL STRENGTHS

some keywords for your ATS:

Data Science R, SQL, time series forecasting, web scraping, automated report generation
Clinical Chemistry Coagulation, assay development and validation, FDA 510(k) program, regulation of medical devices
Molecular Biology Molecular cloning, protein expression and purification, enzyme kinetics, structure-function
Analytical Chemistry HPLC, mass spectrometry, Raman spectroscopy, circular dichroism