Twitter can be a powerful and wonderful tool.
The platform is a fantastic way to find entertainment and stay informed on a variety of topics and interests – including data and statistics!
To get the best out of Twitter, it really helps to follow the right people. Twitter allows the kind of access to data gurus and statisticians that was previously impossible. Now you can tweet directly to the accounts you follow and speak directly to people previously inaccessible.
I know it’s true, because I did it!
I reached out on Twitter to a bunch of influential, famous, and entertaining stats profs, data nerds, and published Data Science experts and asked them to contribute to a book I was working on. And you know what? These cool cats replied and did just that!
All of these guys Tweet regularly on a variety of topics, mostly data but funny stuff too, and I enjoy engaging with them on Twitter.
I recommend you follow them and lighten up your feed too!
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You can find further details in our TCs
Who Are They?
Senior Lecturer and Policy Fellow at the Rockefeller Center at Dartmouth College.
What Do They Do?
Charles is a regular contributor to the Motley Fool Radio Show on National Public Radio and to the Eight Forty-Eight program on WBEZ, Chicago Public Radio.
What Can You Expect From Them?
American professor, journalist, speaker, and the founder and co-chairman of Unite America, Charles is the author of Naked Statistics, Naked Economics and Naked Money.
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Who Are They?
PhD student at Chapman University in Southern California, and the self-styled Chatistician.
What Do They Do?
Her research focuses on applying statistical and Machine Learning techniques to Behavioral Data.
An avid lover of anything silly or statistical (especially if it’s both at once), she does a lot of statistical writing, both professionally and for fun, and a LOT of statistics videos on Tic-Toc.
What Can You Expect From Them?
Chelsea is available for Casual Stats Consulting. A solution for those who don’t need a full on consulting statistician, but need a little bit of help.
Who Are They?
Computational Cognitive Scientist and Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales.
What Do They Do?
Danielle’s research focuses on human concept learning and reasoning, and on statistical methods in the behavioural sciences. Other topics she has researched include decision making, language and cultural evolution, cognitive development, and forensic psychology. In her work as a computational cognitive scientist, she uses a mix of experimental methods and computational modelling techniques to explore how the human mind works.
What Can You Expect From Them?
Check out Danielle’s free book Learning Statistics with R and her free Data Science course Data Science with R.
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Who Are They?
Founder and Managing Director at What’s The Big Data? And Senior Contributor at Forbes.com
What Do They Do?
After spending more than twenty years managing research, marketing, and communications projects and programs at NORC, DEC, and EMC, Gil now runs his own consulting practice, gPress, providing writing, research and marketing services.
What Can You Expect From Them?
Grumpy opinions, fact-based, historically informed
Who Are They?
Professor of Psychology at York University in Toronto
What Do They Do?
Michael Friendly has broad experience in data analysis, statistics and computer applications. He is the author of numerous statistics and data visualization books. His recent work includes the further development of graphical methods for categorical data and multivariate linear models, as well as work on the history of data visualization where he is a world authority.
What Can You Expect From Them?
Check out his website http://datavis.ca/ as well as Friendly’s books Visualising Categorical Data and Discrete Data Analysis with R: Visualization and Modeling Techniques for Categorical and Count Data. His current book, A History of Data Visualization and Graphic Communication (Harvard Press) will be out in 2021.
7 Cool Data Gurus & Statisticians to follow on Twitter - #statistician #dataguru @chi2innovations
Who Are They?
Assistant Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Florida
What Do They Do?
Natalie is a biostatistician specializing in infectious disease epidemiology. Her research is on methods for clinical trial and study design for evaluating vaccine efficacy, with a focus on emerging infectious diseases such as Ebola, Zika, and COVID-19.
What Can You Expect From Them?
Reviews of the latest COVID19 research and tutorials on how to interpret emerging infectious disease data like a real biostatistician.
Who Are They?
Knight Chair in Visual Journalism at the School of Communication of the University of Miami
What Do They Do?
A journalist, designer and the author of several data visualization textbooks, Alberto currently consults with companies and institutions like Google and the Congressional Budget Office, and has provided visualization training to the European Union, the CDC, and many others.
What Can You Expect From Them?
Check out Alberto’s books How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information, The Functional Art: An introduction to information graphics and visualization (Voices That Matter) and The Truthful Art: Data, Charts, and Maps for Communication (Voices That Matter).
Related Resources
Apart from being active in Twitter (have you followed them all yet?), all these data geeks and statisticians have written loads of books. Check them out at Amazon (big fat, hairy, scary affiliate links):
Other Posts in This Series
When I reached out to data gurus, statisticians and Data Scientists on Twitter, I got loads of responses - too many, in fact, to list in this one post.
So I created a series of posts instead, and you can check them all out here:
