Susan E. McGregor

Susan McGregor (she/her/hers) is a Research Scholar at Columbia University's Data Science Institute, where she also co-chairs its Center for Data, Media & Society. She has co-authored a wide range of academic papers and book chapters and is the solo author of two books: Information Security Essentials: A Guide for Reporters, Editors and Newsroom Leaders (Columbia University Press, 2021) and Practical Python: Data Wrangling and Data Quality (O'Reilly, 2021).

McGregor’s research primarily centers on security, privacy and information integrity issues affecting the media and educational organizations. Recent projects include investigating the potential of cryptographic content provenance guarantees for digital text, the potential of peer support for fostering persistence among both journalists and educators, and novel interface designs for enhancing community authenticity on YouTube and other online platforms. Her research work in these and related areas has received support from the National Science Foundation, the Knight Foundation, Google, multiple schools and offices of Columbia University, and others.

As an educator, McGregor is committed to increasing the reach of data science education to help ensure that essential literacies about data-driven systems are accessible to learners of every age and background. To this end, she has led college-level introductory courses for high school students through both the Bard High School Early College (BHSEC) and College Now programs, and is currently pursuing additional graduate coursework and certification in Science Education at Teacher’s College, with a focus on computing education.

Prior to her work at Columbia, McGregor was the Senior Programmer on the News Graphics team at the Wall Street Journal, a front-end programmer at the photo wire service MediaVast (acquired by Getty Images) and a reporter for The New York Amsterdam News. McGregor was named a 2010 Gerald Loeb Award winner for her work on WSJ’s “What They Know” series, and was a finalist for the Scripps Howard Foundation National Journalism Awards for Web Reporting in 2007. Her work has also been nominated for two Webby awards, in 2011 and 2015. While much of her early work for the Wall Street Journal has been lost to various forms of digital decay, a (reasonably) complete list of her peer-reviewed work is currently accessible via Google Scholar. Her many years of course videos on working with data can be found on YouTube, with some early web and digital publishing tools residing - along with this website - on GitHub.

In addition to her technical and academic work, McGregor enjoys using artistic methods to generate new approaches to technological challenges; in the process, she occasionally creates small prototypes and installations. She holds a master’s degree in Educational Communication and Technology from NYU and a bachelor’s degree in Interactive Information Design from Harvard University.