Katya Kelly

Statistics • Geography • Computer Science

About me

I graduated from Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota in December 2018 with a BA in Applied Math & Statistics and minors in Geography and Computer Science. I'm interested in applying the methods I've learned in GIS and other quantitative classes to meaningful research projects. In the past I've done work related to voting rights, suicide rates among youth, earthquake prediction, and survival of minority contestants on the cooking show MasterChef Junior. Aside from work, I enjoy traveling, eating delicious food, trying new ciders, and cheering for the Seattle Seahawks.

Ohio precinct shapefile

This past summer, I was an undergraduate fellow at the Voting Rights Data Institute (VRDI) under the Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering Group at Tufts University. Although I worked on a variety of smaller projects, my main project was helping to build a complete, open-source shapefile of voting precincts in Ohio. I am currently co-writing an R package that contains all of the algorithms I developed with my friend Katie Jolly to approximate these precinct boundaries.

Accuracy of precinct boundary approximations as evaluated by v-measure

Check out these links!