May 4, 2026
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54 min
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565 views
Building Reproducible LLM Workflows | Leslie Emery | Data Science Hangout
ADD THE DATA SCIENCE HANGOUT TO YOUR CALENDAR HERE: https://pos.it/dsh - All are welcome! We’d love to see you!
This week’s guest was Leslie Emery, Senior Principal Data Scientist at Bristol-Myers Squibb!
Some topics covered in this week’s Hangout were data harmonization in Pharma, using LLMs for reproducible data workflows (you read that right!), transitioning from academia to industry, and building custom Shiny apps for internal stakeholders.
One community member asked: “Given your role at BMS, what are some of the challenging aspects and rewards of your role?”
Leslie answered: The most rewarding thing is working on something that someone else is specifically asking for and waiting for, and they’ll be excited to use it the moment it’s ready. Unlike academia where you might work for months or years and publish a paper without hearing feedback, in industry you get immediate feedback helping colleagues who need analysis-ready datasets. The challenging aspect is that BMS is an enormous organization, so everything requires collaboration. She had to learn that instead of trying to learn every single thing herself (the academia mindset), she should look for colleagues who already have expertise and collaborate with them.
Resources mentioned in the video and chat: OHDSI Data Standardization → https://www.ohdsi.org/data-standardization/ CDISC Standards → https://www.cdisc.org/ FHIR Healthcare Data Standard → https://fhir.org/ tidyCDISC R Package → https://github.com/Biogen-Inc/tidyCDISC ADaM Standard → https://www.cdisc.org/standards/foundational/adam XKCD Standards Comic → https://xkcd.com/927/ Book of OHDSI → https://ohdsi.github.io/TheBookOfOhdsi/ Posit Connect Cloud → https://connect.posit.cloud/ Posit Data Science Lab → https://pos.it/dslab Positron IDE → https://posit.co/products/ide/positron Plumber for R APIs → https://www.rplumber.io/ Plumber2 → https://plumber2.posit.co/ Data-as-a-Product Talk (Clara Amorosi, BMS) → https://youtu.be/RrBdbbinS1E?si=gS3JCp0dqFFUVeZx PCDC Data Dictionaries → https://commons.cri.uchicago.edu/data-dictionaries/ Proteomic Data Commons → https://proteomic.datacommons.cancer.gov/pdc/ Cancer Data Aggregator → https://datacommons.cancer.gov/ Ravelry Knitting Community → https://www.ravelry.com/ LibraryThing Book Tracking → https://www.librarything.com/index.php Climate Change Data Visualization in Knitting → https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/knitting-enthusiasts-are-using-their-craft-visualize-climate-change-180974231/ Quinn Daedal Fabric Visualizations → https://quinndaedal.com/blog/2023/12/21/locked-loom-1-gideon-the-ninth/
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Thanks for hanging out with us!
Timestamps: 00:00 Introduction 2:08 “What do you like to do for fun?” 3:23 “What types of data do you see and problems do you solve?” 9:10 “What are some challenging aspects and rewards of your role at the intersection of multiple domains?” 12:25 “What LLMs have you looked into for data harmonization?” 14:52 “Did you knit your sweater?” 15:18 “What sci-fi books do you recommend, and do you think AI could help or hurt with data harmonization?” 20:11 “Does BMS use data curation like CDISC or OHDSI?” 23:08 “How do you get your company to put resources into changing computational infrastructure?” 26:17 “What tools does your team use?” 29:16 “How often do you have to say no to harmonizing incompatible datasets?” 32:40 “Have you figured out how to use ontologies and data dictionaries in your harmonization flow?” 38:08 “Can you share advice for getting into work at the intersection of technical knowledge and data science?” 44:02 “Are you incorporating skills or MCP for providing necessary context?” 45:23 “Is there a way to measure levels of harmonization or dissonance in data, like in music?” 47:39 “Do you still have long-term projects? How do you motivate yourself through them?” 50:54 “Do you have a Ravelry account for tracking knitting projects?”
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