Robin Donatello

Robin Donatello

Associate Professor of Statistics and Data Science

California State University, Chico

About me

When I’m not on campus, typically i’m growing 🥕🌾🍅🍆🍏 for my family, out adventuring with my 🐶🧔🐩 , or getting some 🎮🎲📚 time in.

Campus life consists of:

  • Teaching the next generation of Scientists how to harness the power of Statistics and Data in a responsible and ethical manner.
  • Providing Statistical consulting and analytical support for many projects on and off campus.
  • Supporting students in their academic adventures through intensive advising and research.
  • Leading the Data Science Initative (DSI) to develop Data Science capacity on our campus.

Interests

  • Racial Equity in STEM
  • Data Science
  • Student Success
  • Data Editing and Imputation
  • Gardening for food
  • Pitbulls and puppies
  • Being outdoors

Education

  • Dr. P.H. in Biostatistics, 2013

    Fielding School of Public Health, University of California, Los Angeles

  • MS in Biostatistics, 2007

    Fielding School of Public Health, University of California, Los Angeles

  • BS in Mathematics, Option in Statistics, 2005

    California State University, Chico

  • BS in General Biology, Minor in Chemistry, 2005

    California State University, Chico

Contact

Teaching

I teach the following courses at Chico State. The term where I last taught that class is listed in parentheses.

And have created, curated, or contributed to the following teaching materials, most of which (textbook excepted) are licenced under CC-BY-NC.

Last updated January, 2024

Projects

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Adolescent and School Health

Los-Angeles based research group implementing school-based teen pregnancy prevention programs

Institutional Learning through Empirical Assessment and Researching iNterventions

The iLEARN project will initiate a systematic, institutional approach to assessing the impact of programs on student success.

Sustaining Success in Chemistry

This project enhances a current Sustaining Success project designed to improve student performance in Chemistry 111 (increased GPA, decrease DWF rate) by providing a deeper look at the characteristics of who takes this course, and who passes this course.

Passion Driven Statistics - Statistics to support science

Passion-Driven Statistics (PDS) is an introductory, project-based model that gets students hooked on the excitement and power of quantitative research. I am a site partner for the PDS grant, and have been using this pedagogy in Math 315 since Spring 2018. Click the PDF link below to see a poster I presented at the Joint Math Meetings

College of Natural Sciences Poster Session

Streamlining abstract submission, processing, and judging for the annual College Poster Session at CSU, Chico. Pipeline uses Google Forms, R, Markdown, Sweave, LaTeX, GitHub, and Shiny.

Talks

Reducing costs, burden, and risk of human error in large scale survey data collection and Scope of Work reporting using Automation

Ongoing activities involving multiple stages or partner organizations–such as tracking survey participants or program subcontractor …

Resilience of Passion-Driven statistics in the face of Pandemic Online learning

This work analyzes trends from Sp19 to Fa21 (48 schools, 2,288 students), in student experiences and gains during the switch to online …

Promote Yourself: Make Your Own Professional Website Without Knowing HTML.

Data analysts tend to write a lot of reports, describing their analyses and results, for their collaborators or to document their work …

Publications

(2022). Exploring housing insecurity in relation to student success. Journal of American College Health.

Code DOI

(2021). Host Correlates of Avian Influenza Virus Infection in Wild Waterfowl of the Sacramento Valley, California. Avian Diseases.

DOI

(2020). Deliberate practice in simulation - Evaluation of repetitive code training on nursing students' BLS team skills. Clinical Simulation in Nursing.

Ramblings

Guidelines for Creating a Good Scientific Poster

This post contains general guidelines on how to make a scientific poster. You should always check the standards and requirements for the specific conference, site or session where you will be presenting.

Rebuilding this Site, Again, from Near Scratch

The last time I updated this website was in 2017 [link to other post]. I’m taking a full year sabbatical, and so I wanted to start by doing some updates to this site first.

Using dplyr and foreach to read in multiple data sets from disk

I had a student (Jack Fogliasso) bring me a problem from a Microbiology lab where they are trying to identify bacteria using lasers. One of the items they wanted to understand was the absorption rates of different wavelengths.