Curriculum Vitae

Devin Oommen

Chicago, IL · devin.oommen@gmail.com · 630-456-6784 · LinkedIn ↗ · GitHub ↗

Tools & Skills

Languages

Python R SQL JavaScript VBA HTML/CSS Bash

Python

pandas NumPy SciPy scikit-learn Flask FastAPI faster-whisper asyncio aiosqlite pdfplumber BeautifulSoup Selenium Playwright geopy PyInstaller Pydantic RapidFuzz httpx

R

tidyverse sf / ggplot2 Shiny Leaflet stargazer lmtest sandwich car AER (ivreg) microbenchmark parallel

Statistical Methods

OLS / MLR 2SLS / IV MLE Monte Carlo Simulation Bootstrap CI Permutation Tests KDE Bayesian Inference Log-Linear Models Interaction Effects Heteroskedasticity Diagnostics (BP/White) LPM Causal Inference

ML & NLP

Classification (Random Forest, Logistic Regression, XGBoost) Train-Test Validation Cross-Validation Model Evaluation (Precision/Recall/F1/ROC-AUC) TF-IDF Text Vectorization Whisper Speech-to-Text (CTranslate2/Int8) Voice Activity Detection (WebRTC VAD) Fuzzy Text Matching (Aho-Corasick + RapidFuzz) Keyword Detection Pipelines

Microsoft Stack

Power Apps Power Query Dataverse VBA Azure (VMs, DevOps)

Data & Infrastructure

ETL Pipelines PDF Parsing Web Scraping (Static + Dynamic) Geocoding (Google Maps API) Geospatial Visualization (Choropleth) Parallel Computing Code Profiling Real-Time Audio Streaming (FFmpeg) SQLite Git / GitHub AWS (EC2) Azure DevOps Jira Tableau

Reproducible Research

Quarto R Markdown LaTeX Jupyter Notebooks APSA Citation Workflow

Dev Workflow

AI-Assisted Development (Claude Code, GitHub Copilot) Test-Driven Development Async Architecture Production Release Management Device Provisioning macOS App Packaging

Research & Communication

FOIA / Public Records Requests Source Development & Stakeholder Interviewing AP-Style News Writing Under Deadline FDA Regulatory Documentation Qualitative Data Collection Technical Writing

Work Experience

Northern Illinois University, Dept. of Political Science

2024 – 2025
Graduate Research Assistant
  • Conducted independent honors thesis: merged 12 SHRUG datasets (484,630 villages), ran MLR with log-linear specification, interaction terms, and centered covariates; tested heteroskedasticity (BP/White) and multicollinearity (VIF); generated choropleth maps of consumption and electrification. Presented at MPSA 2025.
  • Built multi-iteration Python scraper for presidential election PDFs (history.house.gov); stateful line-by-line parser handling page boundaries and CONTINUED headings; produced 2,000+ row dataset across 6 election cycles, 50 states, 233 party/candidate entries.
  • Analyzed ACLED conflict event data (cross-tabulation of political violence by actor, event type, region) for comparative case study on Indian development.

Revolution New Medicine

Sep 2025 – Dec 2025
Operations Systems Engineer
  • Architected and built unified enterprise operations platform as sole technical resource (Power Apps, Dataverse, GymMaster API, VBA, Power Query) consolidating 10 discrete systems (patient scheduling, check-in, KPI tracking, daily operating reports), reducing 2 full days of manual patient-day prep to 30 minutes.
  • Built ETL pipelines transforming wide-format clinical data to relational schema with boolean logic conversion and automated API integration pulling live data from practice management system.
  • Developed KPI framework with 30+ performance metrics and automated R reporting infrastructure; eliminated an estimated 30+ hours/week of manual data collection across front desk and clinical operations.

Shaw Local News Network (Daily Chronicle, My Suburban Life)

Jul 2025 – Present
Freelance Reporter & Photojournalist
  • Freelance reporter and photojournalist covering immigration enforcement, community organizing, public safety, housing policy, and civic affairs across DeKalb and DuPage counties for professional regional news network. ~15 published stories with original photography across multiple Shaw Local publications.
  • Published front-page A1 cover story on new-graduate unemployment synthesizing St. Louis Fed data, Bureau of Labor Statistics revisions, and Georgetown workforce research with local NIU graduate interviews. Covered Rep. Lauren Underwood town hall on healthcare costs. All stories published with audio versions.

Northern Star (NIU)

Aug 2023 – May 2025
News Reporter | News Editor
  • Directed news operation producing 135 stories and 59,000+ published words. Managed 10+ reporters across city government, campus, courts, elections, and immigration beats. Substantially rewrote and added content to reporter drafts; attended events to verify accuracy of coverage.
  • Led 2–3 month FOIA-sourced investigation into apartment fire code violations (1,000+ pages of documents, interviews with city attorney, fire marshal, and property ownership group). Broke $400M Kraft Heinz construction delay story one month ahead of local professional outlets via FOIA. Used Wayback Machine to document institutional language changes on NIU's website, prompting faculty inquiry to university council.
  • Identified source-driven stories competitors missed: connected a public arrest record to a retired NIU professor through community source network; verified with university, doorstepped subject for comment. Institutional communications office contacted editor directly to break visa revocation story; FOIA revealed additional details about affected students.
  • Produced data journalism with interactive visualizations: student origin maps, international student demographics, staff/faculty ethnicity data, enrollment by college, grade distributions, and monthly crime maps built from custom Python ETL pipeline. Built end-to-end crime log ETL: Python scraper for 250+ PDFs, 5+ parser iterations, geocoding via Google Maps API with 30+ hardcoded campus fallbacks, R Shiny interactive map ↗ deployed to shinyapps.io. 155% increase in daily page views; 46k monthly unique users.
  • 76 bylines and 37,000+ words across two years (Reporter → Senior Reporter → Editor). 137+ career bylines across three newsrooms.
  • Coverage recognized by DeKalb County Clerk, neighboring city mayor, and NPR affiliate WNIJ (recorded on-air segment providing context for Sycamore double murder trial). League of Women Voters member cited petition challenge coverage as the most thorough available.

Haroon Atcha for COD Board Campaign

Dec 2022 – May 2023
Data Analyst
  • Built voter targeting model in R using Illinois voter roll; identified likely supporters by filtering for voters who participated in 2 of 3 prior municipal elections and voted in Democratic primaries across 50+ precincts.
  • Built field recommendations and data-driven slide deck supporting 40k+ votes.

Evolve Fitness & Training

Oct 2023 – July 2025
Personal Trainer
  • Led 1–3 group classes weekly; coached safe movement and positive member experience.

The Courier (College of DuPage)

Fall 2021 – Spring 2023
Staff Writer
  • Covered board of trustees governance, tuition policy, faculty contract negotiations, and institutional accountability over two years; 46 bylines spanning Federal Reserve policy, SCOTUS nominations, assault weapon legislation, and local elections.
  • Won ICCJA Reporter of the Year (2022) across 15 Illinois community colleges. Co-designed statewide award-winning data infographic on student demographics.

MGSOSA Midwest Region & St. George Church

2011 – 2025
Regional Program Director (Volunteer)
  • Directed operations for a regional multi-state youth organization spanning 5+ churches across 7 states, planning and executing 27+ events including multi-day residential conferences with up to 130 attendees across 3 simultaneous sites with live video streaming, coordinating 20+ volunteers.
  • Managed $75,000–100,000 in cumulative organizational budget through progressively sophisticated financial systems, from double-entry journals to multi-sheet forecast-and-actual budgeting with per-person cost modeling across 5 pricing tiers. Built organizational information infrastructure from scratch: registration systems, committee structures (8 work streams), financial tracking, communication protocols, maintaining 900+ stakeholder relationships.

Unify One Solutions

2015 – 2016, Aug 2019 – May 2020
QA Engineer & Technical Consultant
  • Served as final QA gate for Surfacide's Android medical device application; all production releases to the app store required sign-off. Designed and executed manual and regression test suites across mobile app, web portal, and local-to-cloud data migration pipeline.
  • Authored FDA De Novo white paper documenting QA methodology and test coverage that supported Surfacide's successful regulatory clearance for UV-C disinfection hardware.
  • Coordinated with offshore development team (Belarus) via Jira: triaging bugs, writing detailed reproduction steps, managing ticket lifecycle from report through verification. Provisioned AWS EC2 and Azure VM infrastructure for development environments.
  • Provided L2/L3 technical support for field representatives; diagnosed hardware-software integration issues by inspecting device-level message traffic. Loaded custom OS onto Android tablets for device provisioning and deployment.
  • Built web scrapers (Python/BeautifulSoup) for internal data collection; tested Shamrock International's e-commerce product portal through launch. Presented client deliverables directly to Surfacide and Shamrock International stakeholders.

Education

Northern Illinois University

May 2025
B.S. Political Science (Honors)
  • Associate University Honors | Mortar Board Honor Society
  • Key Coursework: Computational Methods in Statistics (R/Python: MLE, Monte Carlo, bootstrap, KDE, parallel computing — closed-book coded exams); Econometrics + Lab (R: OLS, 2SLS/IV, LPM, robust SEs, heteroskedasticity diagnostics); Rational Decision Making/Honors (Bayesian inference, CLT, experimental design); Political Analysis; Discrete Mathematics

College of DuPage

2023
A.A. Liberal Arts (Honors), Python Proficiency Certificate (Honors)
  • Key Coursework: Advanced Python Programming; Intro to Python; Programming Logic & Technique; Computers/Information Systems; Statistics for Social/Behavioral Sciences

Presentations & Research

Determinants of Household Electrification — A Cross-Sectional Analysis of Socioeconomic & Gender Inequities in India

Midwest Political Science Association (MPSA) · 2025

Statistical analysis using SHRUG dataset (600k rows) examining links between electrification and household welfare in rural India. Built multiple linear regression models with interaction terms; identified a positive effect of domestic electricity access (~1.6–3.2% increase in estimated monthly consumption per capita).

Do Voters in Community College Board of Trustees Elections Vote Along Party Lines?

College of DuPage Research Symposium · 2023

Analyzed ISBE campaign finance and election data; found correlation between fundraising and voter turnout. Examined demographic and party affiliation data to uncover trends in candidate success and representation.

Data Privacy & Data Regulations as a Function of Hegemonic Power

College of DuPage Library Research Symposium · 2021

Linked data regulatory regimes to global power structures; examined how hegemonic states shape international data governance frameworks.

Technical Projects

DeKalb Scanner Alerts

Python · faster-whisper · FFmpeg · WebRTC VAD · FastAPI · WebSocket · asyncio · aiosqlite · RapidFuzz · Pydantic · PyInstaller
  • Real-time police scanner transcription and alerting system. Ingests live Broadcastify audio via FFmpeg, runs Whisper STT with Int8 quantization, detects critical keywords via Aho-Corasick + fuzzy matching (90% threshold), pushes alerts via email/Slack/WebSocket dashboard.
  • Fully async architecture (14 modules, ~800 LOC). Packaged as standalone macOS app via PyInstaller.

Follow The Money Illinois  Live Site ↗

Python · Flask · SQLite · Playwright · FEC/OpenFEC API Integration
  • Built an end-to-end public campaign-finance data platform ingesting Illinois state bulk filings and FEC federal data into a unified analytics layer.
  • Automated recurring federal sync + analytics refresh with production deployment on Linux and scheduled systemd timer workflows.
  • Implemented reconciliation views and donor intelligence features, including searchable dashboards and donor/network analytics for high-volume campaign-finance data.
  • Ingested 6.4M+ receipts rows, 530k+ D2 totals, and 1.3M+ donor analytics rows with normalization and quality checks for reliable reporting.
  • Improved responsive/mobile UX and platform reliability through pytest coverage and recurring QA checks.

Crime Log ETL Pipeline  northernstar.info ↗

Python · R Shiny · Leaflet · Google Maps API
  • 250-PDF scraper with 5+ parser iterations, geocoding pipeline, interactive Shiny map.
  • Published monthly in AP-style crime reports with embedded maps.

Legislative Bill Stats — Full-Stack Analytics Dashboard  Live App ↗

Python (FastAPI) · SQLite · JavaScript · Chart.js · D3.js
  • Built a full-stack web application (FastAPI + vanilla JS) that aggregates bill sponsorship, cosponsorship, and enactment outcomes for the U.S. Congress (Congress.gov API) and Illinois General Assembly (ILGA FTP XML).
  • Implemented resilient data ingestion with pagination, parallel fetchers, retries/timeouts, background refresh, and layered caching (disk + SQLite) to manage API rate limits while keeping the UI responsive.
  • Designed an indexed SQLite schema (legislators, bills, cosponsors, laws) and computed derived metrics including public/private law breakdown, time-to-enactment, and bipartisan co-sponsorship scoring.
  • Delivered an interactive dashboard with filter/sort/search, party-level aggregate statistics, leaderboards (most sponsored, most enacted, highest success rate, most bipartisan, fastest to enact), CSV export, Chart.js legislative activity timelines, and D3.js co-sponsor network visualizations (force-directed and hierarchical edge bundling).
  • Added pytest unit and integration tests and a cron-friendly refresh script for automated data updates.

Electrification & Welfare in Rural India  Honors Capstone

R · sf · stargazer · Quarto · LaTeX
  • Cross-sectional analysis of 484,630 Indian villages (12 merged datasets). MLR testing domestic, commercial, and agricultural electrification effects on consumption.
  • Found 1.6% welfare increase from domestic electricity. R² = 0.82. 11 academic citations (JPE, World Development, Energy Economics).

Monte Carlo Simulation Study — ANOVA Robustness

  • Designed Monte Carlo simulation (n=700 iterations) in R to evaluate ANOVA robustness under varying effect sizes and error distributions.
  • Analyzed Type I error rates and statistical power across normal and non-normal (exponential) error conditions.

Presidential Election Data Pipeline

Research Assistant
  • Scraped and standardized presidential primary election data from 100+ state-party PDF documents.
  • Built reproducible data pipeline for professor's ongoing research.

COD Board of Trustees Financial Pipeline

Python · Selenium · BeautifulSoup · pdfplumber · pandas
  • ETL pipeline scraping 20+ months of board meeting packets. Dual scraping architecture (Selenium for dynamic, requests for static), two PDF parsers (budget expenditures + accounts payable), 10+ regex patterns, CSV aggregation.
  • Built for professor's governance research.

Awards & Recognition

2025
John G. & Barbara C. Peters Scholarship for Outstanding Public Service
2025
Jim Killam Mentor Award
2025
Roy G. Campbell "Best Damn Reporter" Award
2024
ICPA News Story of the Year — Honorable Mention
2023
ICCJA Reporter of the Year — 1st Place
2021
COD Library Research Symposium — Honorable Mention
2021
Academic Excellence — COD Political Science

Extracurriculars & Volunteer

Democratic National Convention — Volunteer (2024) Associated Press — Election Stringer (2022) Economic Student Association (2024)