My name is Ben Cipollini; I'm the director of data science at Classy. I previously was a post-doctoral scholar in the Computer Science & Engineering Department at UC San Diego, after finishing my Ph.D in Cognitive Science in June 2014. My undergraduate degree is in Computer Science from Lehigh Univesity. Previous to that, I worked within server technology teams (Windows/IIS, Exchange, SQL) at Microsoft.

At work, I lead a team of data scientists trying to understand the who / what / when / why / how of non-profit giving. It's a space traditionally driven by emotion, and where ideas from data science and the for-profit world are offering new perspectives and opportunities to help change the world.

In my research, I use computational modeling to understand how and why the left and right sides of the brain differ, and how they interact over the corpus callosum. I have used neural network models (rate coded and spiking, feed-forward and recurrent with time delays), cross-species allometric analyses, and finally multivariate analyses of neuroimaging and genetic data.

I am a big proponent of open source programming and science: using and contributing to publicly available datasets, open source software, and understandable science communication. At Classy, my team publishes all code and data behind blog posts, and regularly contributes to open source projects. From my academic time, all of my research code can be found on Github. I blog for a number of websites, develop interactive visualizations of brain data, and have begun to give public talks.

Outside of academia, I particularly enjoy photography. I post photos to Google Plus, Redbubble, and Fine Art America. I also think a lot about the intersections of ethics, politics, and science, and hope to share more thoughts on such topics soon!


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