Hello! It’s nice to meet you

I am a data scientist and software engineer at RStudio PBC where I work on open source modeling tools. My last name is pronounced SILL-GHEE (two syllables, short i, hard g). I love making beautiful charts, the statistical programming language R, Jane Austen, black coffee, and red wine.

I studied physics and astronomy, finishing my PhD in 2005. I worked in academia (teaching and doing research) and ed tech before moving into data science in 2015 and discovering R. I am an author, an international speaker, and a real-world practitioner focusing on data analysis and machine learning. I have written books with my collaborators about text mining, supervised machine learning for text, and modeling with tidy data principles in R. You can find me on Twitter and GitHub.

I live in Salt Lake City, UT, with my husband, three kids, and two cats.

This blog is built with blogdown and Hugo, and deployed using Netlify. My blog posts are released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. My illustrated portrait is by Emily Griffin (and gifted to me by my friend and former coworker Jason Punyon).

If my blog has helped you, you can buy me a coffee on Ko-fi!