Michigan Air Violations Tracker

I pitched, designed and developed an interactive platform for nonprofit newsroom Planet Detroit that allows readers to explore the violation history of air polluters in Michigan. It updates every day with the newest violation notices issued by EGLE.

I made the dashboard using javascript—a first for me—and created a program that looks for new violation notices every day, parses them with pdfplumber, and adds them to the data.

In its first week, the site helped us report on a chronic violator in Southwest Detroit. Deep gratitude to Planet Detroit for making this open data accessibility project possible.

Southwest Detroit steel slag processor receives 12th air quality permit violation for fallout since 2018

Using the Michigan Air Violations Tracker I created, I reported on a chronic violator in an area of Detroit and Dearborn that is overburdened by industry and air pollution.

Quantifying mental health care accessibility for children in NYC

For my master's project, I surveyed 172 (roughly 80%) of the child and adolescent community mental health clinics in NYC and collected wait times for a new child appointment. I visualized the results and spoke to a dozen experts about what led us to this point.

Experts often said that the insurance reimbursment rates for mental health were way too low. To try to quantify the non-insurance market rate, I scraped and and analyzed thousands of NYC-area Psychology Today provider profiles to figure out what people were charging and visualize the pay gap.

Mapping metro Detroit air permit violation disparities

I analyzed air quality permit violation data for DETROITography and visualized the the disproportionate number of major and mega sources of air pollution in Wayne County.

The article includes a couple of maps of these sources and their violations compared to poverty data and the state's environmental justice scores.

Creating a living dataset of Michigan air pollution records

I scraped 19,000+ pdfs from the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy to create a searchable dataset of air pollution records by type of document (i.e. violation notice, compliance evaluation, stack test report), date, company, county, zip code and address.

🔍 My auto-scraper searches the Michigan database daily for new documents and adds them to existing datasets.

Michigan journalists have used this dataset to keep tabs on local sources of air pollution and hold the state accountable for enforcement of its air regulations.

Visualizing the child psychologist shortage

There are nearly 1.3 million children who rely on Medicaid for health coverage in New York City. I wanted to know, how many child psychologists are accessible to them?

I created a scraper to cross reference Medicaid provider codes with the their CMS profiles to figure out who specialized in treating children. Then I visualized the ratio of child psychologists to kids on Medicaid using hand-drawn illustrations, ai2html and scrollama.

Analyzing changes in Great Lakes water consumption

For an exercise in my Data Studio course at Columbia, I concatted nine separate .csv files of nine years' worth of Great Lakes water usage data to analyze changes over time. My analysis found that consumption, increased significantly since 2019 due to a change in power generation methods.

Visualizing Denver's increasing park traffic

For Columbia's Data Studio seminar, I analyzed both Google's COVID-19 Mobility data and its search trends data to show that Denver residents were searching for and using their parks more than in 2020.

Colorado drought and fire risk map

For Columbia's 2022 Points Unknown course, I created an interactive map visualizing current drought levels and predicted average wildfire flame intensity per county using USDA Fire Service data.

Quantifying the New York Medicaid pay gap for mental health care

Mental health professionals and advocates say Medicaid reimbursement rates are abysmal and that this plays a role in whether a provider choses to work with insurance. In an attempt to quantify this claim, I scraped thousands of NYC-area provider profiles on PsychologyToday.com to see what folks were charging on average for a session.

Community reporting: "In New York’s East Village, Young Ukrainians Hold Onto Their Culture"

Media analysis: How Fox News redefined critical race theory

As part of a group reporting project, my team analyzed two years' worth of Fox News broadcasts to track its coverage of critical race theory over time. Together we created a comprehensive timeline of recent events including major TV network and online coverage, protests and legislative actions.