Tinashe Tapera

Tinashe is a Research Software Engineer on the Climate-Smart Public Health data science team with a background in a wide range of academic and professional fields. From 2018 to 2022, Tinashe was a neuroimaging data analyst at the Penn Lifespan Informatics and Neuroimaging Center, where he developed various software and programming tools to process, curate, and analyze neuroimaging data. In the role, Tinashe gained his expertise in developing robust, reproducible, and scalable data preprocessing pipelines, using technologies like Python, R, bash, and docker. Tinashe earned his Accelerated BSMS in Psychology from Drexel University. Mentored by Fengqing Zhang of the Quantitative Psychology & Statisics Lab, Tinashe defended his Master’s thesis, “Advanced Data Mining Models for Psychological and Behavioral Research,” in 2018. In addition to his work in psychology, Tinashe has experience as a data scientist in People Analytics, where he worked on NLP and text mining solutions geared to improve employee success, and as a data scientist in Real World Oncology Data (RWD) at ConcertAI, where he developed dashboards for pharmacovigilence of Adverse Events related to cancer treatment exposure.

Tinashe is an advocate for the growing importance of the Research Software Engineer role in the scientific arena. He holds a mentorship position in the official Data Science Learning Community, and is staff writer on the US chapter of the Research Software Engineers Association (US-RSE), where he publishes monthly newsletters and think pieces about research software engineering.

Tinashe is currently completing a second Master’s degree at Northeastern University in Health Informatics. When he’s not writing code, you can find him jumping rope at the gym or playing Apex Legends with his wife and brother.