# Tabassum Kakar, PhD > Data and User Centric Product Development ✦ Data Visualization ✦ Problem Solving Location: New York City Metropolitan Area, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/tabassum Experienced in user-centered design and development of data-centric web applications. I excel at eliciting stakeholder requirements and iteratively designing and developing tools including UIs and components that enable users to do more. My unique blend of skills in data science, development, and user research enables me to navigate diverse aspects of end-to-end projects, from requirements gathering to design and development. Tech stack: JavaScript, HTML, Css,React, Vue.js, Python, D3, and SQL. ## Work Experience ### Software Engineer @ Harvard Medical School Jan 2024 – Present ### Data Visualization Scientist @ Gritstone bio Jan 2022 – Jan 2024 | Greater Boston Worked with multidisciplinary teams to understand user tasks to derive use-cases for data-driven web applications and tools. Iteratively designed, developed, deployed and maintained these web-applications using a variety of toolset such as Nodejs, Vue, Flask, Python, D3, SQL, AWS. ### Data Visualization and Reporting Specialist @ Well Jan 2021 – Jan 2022 - Gathered and translated user requirements and extensively used SQL to extract and transform the necessary data to render into Tableau for insights and analysis. - Collaborated with cross-functional teams to identify user requirements and key metrics, and designed 10+ interactive dashboards for insights generation following the best practices. - Led end-to-end analytics projects from problem identification, to data transformation, to designing analytics tools (dashboards) and validating data integrity, besides providing ad-hoc reports. ### Research and Teaching Assistant (Visual Analytics and HCI) @ Worcester Polytechnic Institute Jan 2016 – Jan 2021 | Worcester, Massachusetts - Identified stakeholder needs by conducting user research and iteratively designed and evaluated web-based visual analytics for informed decision-making. - Designed visualizations following the best design practices from human-computer interaction and data visualization and evaluated the interactive systems via remote/in-person usability studies. - Led the end-to-end lifecycle of visual analytics projects with the FDA from requirement gathering to designing mockups to the final development and evaluation of the interactive tools. • Bridged the gap between domain experts with medical background from the FDA, programmers to develop analytics systems, and researchers for designing innovative visual analytics. Below are examples of two visual analytics projects that I have led and worked on. ### ORISE Research Fellow at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) - Visual Analytics @ ORAU Jan 2016 – Jan 2019 Led multiple projects for designing innovative visual analytics from ideation to development and validation to support the drug safety review process at the FDA for analyzing adverse event reports. • Conducted qualitative and quantitative research to understand users' pain-points, tasks, and workflows to derive use-cases. • Designed and developed visual analytics prototypes for the use-cases including reports screening, trend analysis, report summarization following an iterative process including refining design mockups. • Conducted case studies and usability studies to assess the effectiveness of the designed prototypes. • Communicated scientific and technical content to expert and non-expert audiences, and effectively presented results to the top-level management. ### Data Science Intern (Graduate Qualifying Project) @ IBM Jan 2016 – Jan 2016 Aircraft Health & Safety Analytics • Collaborated with a team of four data scientists and stakeholders from IBM to evaluate the value of public datasets in predicting aircraft health and safety issues. • Identified business goals and defined the problem, performed data integration, cleaning, and exploration to apply modeling to identify patterns in the data. • Performed statistical analysis and applied machine-learning techniques such as clustering, association rule mining, and correlation analysis using SQL, R, Python, IBM SPSS Modeler, and IBM Watson. ### Database Administrator @ Microfinance Investment Support Facility for Afghanistan (MISFA) Jan 2013 – Jan 2014 • Designed and conducted a pilot study to evaluate the newly developed Client Profile Management System (CPMS) for monitoring loan records collected from six partner microfinance institutions to avoid fraudulent activities. • Gathered and documented functional specifications from the partnered financial institutions via in-person interviews to refine the system requirements. • Proposed a refined design of the database and software application that met user needs and resulted in cost reduction by $90,000. ### Business Intelligence Developer @ MTN Afghanistan Jan 2012 – Jan 2013 | Kabul • Translated business needs into technical specifications to design BI-reports. • Developed SQL queries to generate reports with information to support decision making. • Designed dashboard visualizations to monitor subscriber and revenue growth. ### Assistant Software Developer @ Kardan University Jan 2011 – Jan 2012 • Designed and developed desktop applications using VB.net and MySQL for the departments of Human Resources and Finance to manage paychecks and finances. • Defined test-cases to evaluate the functionality of the developed applications. ## Education ### Doctor of Philosophy - PhD in Data Science Worcester Polytechnic Institute ### Master's degree in Data Science Worcester Polytechnic Institute Jan 2014 – Jan 2016 ### Bachelor's degree in Computer Software Engineering Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute of Engineering Sciences and Technology Jan 2007 – Jan 2011 ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/tabassumkakar - Website: https://tkakar.github.io/Website/ --- Source: https://flows.cv/tabassum JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/tabassum/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-23