Leader in data science curricula development wins Early Career Alumni Award

By communicating science clearly to the public, she helps audiences of all ages — from preschoolers to grandparents — walk away with something new. “The advice I would give to students who want to teach is to remember what it's like not to know and to have understanding and empathy,” Smalley said.

By making statistics and data science relatable, she hopes to encourage young students to learn how they can use data to benefit people. She wants to help them communicate their discoveries with other communities as well. She developed this outlook when in the first cohort of the Graduate Certificate in College and University Teaching (GCCUT) program, led by Jessica Beck at Oregon State.

“I felt really supported while I was at Oregon State. They gave me a strong foundation to work with.”

That philosophy guided her first big career step in 2018, when Willamette University planned to launch a new data science program. Having just finished graduate school, the timing was perfect.

By leveraging her new education and training from Oregon State, she steered the learning outcomes in the right direction while serving as the Curriculum Committee Chair for the data science and computer science programs. After helping write a Title III grant, the Department of Education awarded nearly $2 million that supported their design of new programs from the ground up.

Today, their six years of hard work is paying off in Willamette’s brand new School of Computing and Information Science. Thanks to the program, students can pursue quality careers in statistics and data science, similar to Oregon State’s competitive statistics programs.

“I use multiple modalities of teaching so that statistics and data science isn’t super theoretic and abstract,” Smalley said. “I always have hands-on components where students are engaging in skill building.”

A student-centered approach to teaching

Smalley’s teaching career took off earlier than expected. While completing her doctorate degree in statistics at Oregon State, she landed a position as visiting assistant professor of statistics at Reed College in Portland. She taught classes at both institutions; some online at Oregon State and others in-person at Reed.

“I felt really supported while I was at Oregon State. They gave me a strong foundation to work with,” Smalley said. “When I'm designing curriculum, I am always thinking about the student experience and what's going to help motivate them to learn this topic.”

For Smalley, the community at Oregon State opened new doors, led to lifelong friends and helped her become the kind of professor she always wanted to be. Her advisor, Sarah Emerson, mentored her throughout graduate school, leaving her with advice that continues to influence how Smalley teaches and conducts research today.

“Several people I know went into higher education to be those professors that wanted to change people’s lives. Having that in common ties us together,” she said. “We are connected because we were in Corvallis together, and I think there’s something really powerful about that.”

Smalley’s teaching and curricula stands out because she keeps teaching pedagogy at the center. Rather than losing students’ attention with extensive and abstract equations, she focuses on the bigger picture. By using diagrams and interactive visuals, students can better understand exactly how and why those equations work rather than root memorization.

“I want my students to feel empowered to use data to understand the world around them. Being a statistician doesn't mean you memorize all the statistics ever created. It's about data literacy,” Smalley said. “It's about asking questions and looking for patterns. You don’t have to memorize equations if you know how something works.”

With great conferences, comes great opportunities

To make the learning experience even more intriguing, Smalley is taking her research to the next level. In the past, she used to be knee-deep in analyzing the data quality of public opinion research. But after a meeting with Scott Pike, professor of environmental science and archaeology at Willamette, she’s going in a new direction.

Now, she’s involved in groundbreaking research — literally. She’s interpreting decades-worth of data collected on a variety of stones, including marble isotopes in Greece and geochemical soil analysis samples from the Ness of Brodgar in Scotland. To help support the next generation of scientists, she loves to include her students in on the fun.

“The students that I'm working with on these projects are amazing. I'm working with a student that is presenting that research next week at a conference,” Smalley said. “I’m really excited about it because I love helping people with their data.”

The cherry on top of her professional career is presenting research at domestic and international conferences. Last summer, she attended the European Survey Research Association (ESRA) conference in the Netherlands, where she connected with professionals whose work she had long admired.

Smalley also loves to attend the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) conference. There, she saw students blossom and build their network for the first time. Every year since 2022, she brings students along so that they have the experience of meeting and presenting to professionals in the field, just like she did.

To prepare them well, she has been mentoring students in the Science Collaborative Research Program (SCRP) at Willamette University every summer since 2022. After students spend the summer doing research, they communicate their findings at a regional conference.

Collaborating with students on research and watching them present during their poster sessions make the entire experience valuable. “I love taking that moment to step back and just watch the students shine. It makes me really emotional to think about because I just feel so proud of them,” Smalley said.

Conferences like these help bring scientists together that wouldn’t otherwise meet. She kept in touch with professionals from the U.S. Census Bureau and is often invited to collaborations with other data scientists. These opportunities not only accelerate her career, but those of young scientists as well.

When she’s not teaching in the classroom, she is assembling interactive science displays and proudly communicating what matters most as an OMSI volunteer, for nearly a decade and counting. Outside of teaching, Smalley is a proud mother of two, busy making the world a better place for her family of Beaver fans.