About me

Hello! Welcome to my coding website!

Let me introduce myself

My name is Sara Benist, and I graduated from the University of Georgia with a Master of Public Health degree concentrating in Epidemiology. After completing my undergraduate degree in Health Promotion from UGA, I served my community as an AmeriCorps VISTA member and leader during the COVID-19 pandemic for two years at the Georgia-based non-profit Helping Mamas before returning to school for my Master’s degree.

With my BS in Health Promotion and MPH in Epidemiology, I have a background in fundamental epidemiology practices, writing professional papers including policy memos and meta-analyses, and other public health practices. I have fundamental knowledge in SAS and Stata through my Introductory Biostatistics and Epidemiology courses, and my Foundations in R Coding course provided a solid foundation in R and its related programs. I enjoy coding in R for the flexibility in the coding as well as the versatility and community of the programming language. With the MADA course, I built upon my coding knowledge and resources to perform data processing and analysis with confidence.

Fun fact: I was in the Redcoat Marching Band at UGA while I was an undergrad! Here I am waiting for the Rose Bowl Parade to start (it was an awesome exhausting day!)

Something I Find Cool

I’m sure everyone is at least a little curious about space (oceans on the other hand… they are a little scary!). For all that curiosity, so few people get to go into space and only a small fraction of people work with the final frontier! NASA has a program called the Universe of Learning that helps people learn about how their work is done and try to discover space themselves. Within the Universe of Learning, the Exoplanet Watch asks volunteers to help map other solar systems by either collecting data using telescopes or performing data analyses to measure how many planets are in a solar system, their relative size, even if the center star has its own rotation. Very cool, and I think it would be an excellent class project for STEM classes to explore!