Hello there! 👋

Welcome to my page!

As you may have guessed, my name is Zoe Ludena! I am currently an undergraduate student attending the University of California, San Diego. I am a Data Science Major in Revelle College with a Business Economics minor. I am set to graduate Winter Quarter 2025.

A fun fact about me is before college I knew nothing about coding! From middle school to the end of high school I studied opera and thought I would become a singer. Covid, like for many others, turned my world upside down as I realized singing would be an unstable profession in the fear of another pandemic. That being said, I have fallen in love with everything Data Science. I have had the greatest privledge being taught and mentored by some of the finest minds at UCSD. I've come a long way and hope to continue to grow!

Some other interests I have are hiking, baking, and art!

Experience

Data Science Instructional Assistant @ Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute

March 2023 - Present

Enhanced student performance and engagement by hosting office hours twice a week and creating 5+ educational videos and examples, leading to improved class comprehension and higher assignment scores.
Streamlined grading processes by transferring 300+ grades across platforms and using tools like Gradescope and Canvas, reducing errors and improving feedback turnaround time.
Improved assignment quality and exam rigor by developing midterm materials and grading assignments for 200+ students, ensuring alignment with learning objectives.
Elevated team effectiveness by mentoring 3 new tutors and attending weekly staff meetings, fostering a collaborative and supportive environment.
Achieved consistent resolution of forum inquiries, answering 10+ questions weekly to clarify complex concepts in Python, Java, Pandas, and NumPy.

Student Worker @ San Diego Sheriff's Office

Feburary 2024 - Present

Identified patterns and anomalies in large, continuously growing text datasets by leveraging text machine learning techniques, Regex, Python, Pandas, and SQL.
Streamlined data processing by developing Azure-based pipelines to clean data incrementally, conduct sentiment analysis, and perform clustering, reducing manual effort by 90%.
Delivered actionable insights through PowerBI reports, enabling stakeholders and users to identify trends and anomalies across employees and text data, leading to improvement in operational efficiency.
Enhanced user satisfaction by collaborating with end-users to customize applications and ensure alignment with business requirements.
Communicated findings effectively through presentations, driving informed decision-making and cross-team alignment.

Professional Events Director @ Data Science Student Society

May 2024 - Present

Curating and hosting a diverse range of professional events, including panel discussions, workshops, and networking sessions with industry partners.
Building and maintaining professional relationships with sponsors, panelists, and speakers.
Exposing students to the diverse sectors of the data science field and provide them with a comprehensive understanding of industry applications and career pathways.
Led a team of 8 individuals with co-director Sid Joshi to provide a better experience for UCSD's student body.

Social Chair @ Eta Kappa Nu

March 2023 - August 2024

Eta Kappa Nu, or HKN, is the official honor society of the Institue of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. I am still a member to this day, but no longer hold a board position!
Secured funding and enhanced event impact by attending weekly meetings with officers and UCSD departments, resulting in a 20% increase in event attendance year-over-year.
Organized and executed campus-wide events by collaborating with diverse teams, meeting tight deadlines, and adapting to high-pressure environments, ensuring seamless delivery and positive attendee feedback.
Improved event growth and engagement by providing actionable feedback to stakeholders, leading to the implementation of new initiatives that increased student participation by 15%.

Research Volunteer @ Engineers for Exploration

October 2022 - June 2023

Part of the Acoustic Species Identification team. Partnered with the San Diego Zoo in an effort to monitor bird populations in the Peruvian Amazon.
Strengthened cross-team communication and feedback loops, ensuring project goals were met on time and aligned with researchers' needs.
Improved species population monitoring by organizing and filtering research data using Python and GitHub, increasing data accessibility and analysis.

Projects

Emulators Exploring the Climate

Programmed in a team to explore using emulators to predict the future from different socioeconomic shared pathways. Used Pattern Scaling, Gaussian Processes, and Random Forests.

Big O Explained

Programmed in a team to create an interactive visualization that would explain Big O Notation to new coders using Python and graphs. Allowed website use for lower division data science classes.

Water Quality & Socioeconomic Status in CA

Explore relationship between socioeconomic factors, race, and water quality in California. Found socioeconomic factors affect water quality!

View Paper

Investigating Abortion Rates

Explore how abortion rates changed in response to representation of female politicians, access to OB/GYN care, and income level. Worked with a team to find income level has little influence, OB/GYN rate has some influence, and women in government has a high influence.

LoL Model Building

Pair programmed to identify a binary classification problem, create a baseline predictive model using two features, and create an improved predictive model using six features and hyper parameters.

LoL Soul Analysis

Pair programmed to clean a DataFrame, used permutation tests to analyze missingness and missingness dependency, and created hypothesis tests to learn about the distribution of data.