February 10, 2016

Welcome to IWRI, Anita Rocha

Please welcome Anita Rocha to IWRI. Anita recently joined the IWRI family as a data manager. She hails from just across the UW campus where she worked as a statistical programmer and data manager for the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology. Her consulting experience in data analytics and the management realm is varied, with a number of years of programming and instructing using statistical packages like Stata, SAS, and SPSS. She may even know enough R, Mplus, or LISREL to help folks. Her passion for reusable data and replicable analysis brought her into contact with the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI), a group who have developed and continue to improve upon an open source metadata standard for data in the social sciences. Anita recently served on the DDI Alliance executive board for two years.
Anita’s other passion is the promotion of civic engagement. She served as the president of UW’s Professional Staff Organization where she fought to maintain employee benefits during the prolonged economic downturn. She has participated in and led events for a nonprofit organization called United to End Racism where, beginning with our own personal stories, people are encouraged to apply the principles of Re-Evaluation Counseling to dismantle racism. Anita, also a student, now enters her third year in the PhD program in Social Welfare where she studies youth development as civic participants, particularly youth from under-represented subpopulations of the U.S. Raised with Mexican identity in Southern California with roots among the Indigenous Purépecha of Michoacán, Anita currently identifies as Chicana.