Addison Larson

Data Scientist at Mathematica in Princeton, NJ. I'm a displaced Texan who lives in Birmingham, AL.

[resume] [github]

Software and languages

Programming languages Stata, R, SAS, Python, VBA, SQL

GIS software QGIS, ArcMap 10.x, ArcGIS Pro, ArcGIS Online, ArcGIS StoryMap, ModelBuilder, ArcPy

Project and code management Git, Github, Jira, Confluence, Trello, SharePoint, OneNote

Niche (enough) skills

Things I am working on now

Prior project examples

Data visualization

School closures and the pre-pandemic digital divide

Background

This app was created in R Shiny and enables the user to visualize county-level open-source data on school days impacted by school closures during the pandemic, students' access to technology, and student demographic characteristics. The map view, graphs, and infographics update automatically according to the combinations of variables selected and enable the user to visualize two variables simultaneously.

Link

Web app

Screenshot of the school closures app showing the intersection of school days impacted by school closure and broadband internet access for PA, NJ, and DE.

Community Connector

Background

This interactive web application was built in R Shiny and visualized social determinants of health data and health outcomes for Colorado Counties. It won the grand prize in the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality's Visualization of Community-Level Social Determinants of Health Challenge.

Links

Screenshot of the Community Connector app.

FY 2023 Title X Service Grant Awards Grantee Profiles

Background

During FY 2023 the Office of Population Affairs awarded Title X Family Planning funding to 86 grantees nationwide. These brief Word documents summarize each grantee's service setting, clinic locations, and activities over the course of the year.

While the grantee profile documents are brief, they synthesize information from several sources, including data from a grantee survey and the American Community Survey; interviews of grant recipients; and addresses scraped, geocoded, and mapped from PDFs such as this one.

Contributions

Link

FY 2023 Title X Service Grant Awards

Screenshot of an example grantee profile.

Public policy analysis and impact evaluation

Promoting Readiness of Minors in Supplemental Security Income (PROMISE)

Background

This project analyzed the impact of a program implemented across 6 state agencies to support youth with disabilities receiving Supplemental Security Income. The analysis included an evaluation of impacts five years after random assignment on youth and parent outcomes, a cost-benefit analysis, and a series of special topic reports. We worked with both survey and administrative data, such as surveys of youth and their parents five years after random assignment, earnings data from the Social Security Administration's Master Earnings File, and data on Medicaid and Medicare expenditure and use from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

Contributions

Links

Screenshot of the most common pathways for PROMISE youth.

Assessing the benefits of the Success Sequence for economic self sufficiency and family stability

Background

The "Success Sequence" posits that achieving the life milestones of education, employment, marriage, and childbearing, in this order, are associated with better economic outcomes in later life. This study tested the Success Sequence hypothesis by analyzing youth's milestone achievements and economic outcomes using two nationally representative longitudinal datasets: the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health.

Contributions

Link

Report

Screenshot of milestone completion and order for NLSY youth.

Large-scale data collection, cleaning, and summary

Family Planning Annual Report (FPAR) 2.0

Background

Grantees receiving Title X federal funding for family planning are required to submit an annual report (that is, the Family Planning Annual Report) of their activities to the Office of Population Affairs (OPA) to monitor program performance. Mathematica's work on FPAR 2.0 includes creating and running an online portal to gather grantee data submissions; issuing a summary of grantees' activities, overall and by region; and conducting additional analyses as requested by OPA.

Contributions

Link

Family Planning Annual Report

State Child Abuse & Neglect (SCAN) Policies Database

Background

The SCAN Policies Database is a longitudinal quantitative dataset of policies related to child maltreatment for the 50 U.S. states, DC, and Puerto Rico. These policies differ by state and can change from year to year; this database enables researchers to quickly compare across states and over time. Without the database, the researcher would need to track down each state's statutes documents online, download them, and read them before being able to make a comparison. I was part of the team for the first two rounds of data collection.

Contributions

Link

SCAN Policies Database

Screenshot of the SCAN Data Explorer.

Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) 2019 state and local implementation study

Background

This study evaluated the ways states, districts, and schools were supporting children with disabilities 15 years after the Individuals with Disability Education Act (IDEA) was last updated and compared these results to similar surveys conducted in 2009. To get a full picture of IDEA implementation, the study issued 6 surveys, including 3 surveys of states, 2 surveys of a nationally representative sample of school districts, and one survey of a nationally representative sample of schools.

Contributions

Link

Compendium of Survey Results

Head Start Family and Child Experiences Survey (FACES)

Background

FACES is a series of nationally representative surveys of Head Start programs, centers, classrooms, and the children and families who participate. Surveys are conducted twice a year and are regularly updated to address current events or policy questions. These surveys help programs and practitioners understand the characteristics of children who participate in Head Start, their families, and their teachers. I have been a member of the FACES team across four rounds of data collection with six surveys per round.

Contributions

Links

Geospatial and planning

Regional Transit Screening Platform (RTSP)

Background

This interactive geospatial web application provides information for transportation planners in Greater Philadelphia to consider public transit needs and opportunities, including a transit network gap analyzer, data on surface transit reliability and ridership, and other measures.

Contributions

Created the segment-level surface transit reliability measure for the RTSP using QGIS and R.

Links

Screenshot of surface transit reliability measure from the Regional Transit Screening Platform.

Equity Analysis for the Greater Philadelphia Region

Background

The Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission (DVRPC) creates a regularly-updated tract-level measure to evaluate the equity impacts of planning projects in Greater Philadelphia. This measure synthesizes American Community Survey (ACS) data on population age, race, ethnicity, disability status, income, and other variables into a single aggregate measure.

Contributions

Wrote a program in R to update the equity analysis measure (which is still in use after I wrote the code in 2018!)

Links

Screenshot of composite equity measure from the Equity Analysis for Greater Philadelphia web map.

Pedestrian Cyclical Count Program

Background

The Southeastern Pennsylvania Pedestrian Cyclical Count Program conducts counts of pedestrians at a selection of representative locations throughout the Greater Philadelphia region over time.

Contributions

Developed a stratified random sampling scheme to select a series of segments along the road network to conduct pedestrian counts. These strata accounted for population density, demographic characteristics, proximity to schools and transit, and road functional class.

Links

Screenshot of pedestrian count locations in Philadelphia.

Prior presentations and research

Conference presentations

Larson, A. (2019, May). Evaluating the reliability of ACS data for transportation planning. Paper presented at the American Community Survey Data Users Conference, Washington, DC.

Moran, S. & Larson, A. (2019, April). Data-driven transit planning tools. Project presented at the New Jersey TransAction Conference, Atlantic City, NJ.

Larson, A. (2018, April). Urban monocentricity and the journey to work: Commutes of low-income workers in Dallas, TX and Washington, DC. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers, New Orleans, LA.

University research

Larson, A. (2018). Urban structure, residential choice, and proximity to work for low-income residents (Master's project). The University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX.

Larson, A. (2017). Emergency call box visibility on the UT Dallas campus (Safety study for Student Government). The University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX.

Larson, A. (2016). Hotbeds of hate: Analyzing spatial and temporal disparities in hate crime across U.S. cities (Undergraduate honors thesis). The University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX.