Elda Shatro

CS @ UIC|SWE Intern @ IDOT|Undergraduate Researcher|Teaching Assistant
currently
Data Science Machine Learning Full-Stack Analytics
Explore My Work Get in touch
01

About Me

Elda Shatro Your photoimages/image.jpg

I'm Elda Shatro, a Computer Science student at the University of Illinois Chicago with a passion for data science, machine learning, and software engineering. I love building applications that solve practical problems and transforming messy, real-world data into meaningful insights.

Whether I'm building full-stack applications, designing data pipelines, or training machine learning models, I'm driven by creating technology that makes a real-world impact. Outside of coding, I conduct research, create data science curriculum, and enjoy exploring new coffee spots.

0data entries analyzed
0students taught as TA
What I focus on
Data Science & ML
PandasPyTorchXGBoostScikit-learn
Full-Stack Engineering
ReactNode.jsFastAPIPostgreSQL
Data & Analytics
SQLMySQLPowerBIMatplotlib
Outside the work Things I love doing

Family & friends

Long dinners with the people who keep me grounded.

Coffee

An ongoing search for the best espresso in Chicago. Always taking recommendations.

Traveling

New cities, different cultures and delicious food.

02

Experience

May 2026 — Present
Chicago, IL
Software Engineering Intern
Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT)
  • Built a full-stack React/TypeScript and FastAPI application replacing the Microsoft Access incident-reporting form used by IDOT operators statewide — leading contributor across 31 merged pull requests and 21 tracked issues on a 6-engineer team, moving a desktop-bound legacy workflow into a single browser-based system.
  • Engineered the geospatial layer — forward/reverse geocoding, drag-to-place pins resolving county, nearest town, and IDOT district on drop, and GeoJSON boundary overlays — eliminating a manual transcription step on every incident report filed statewide.
  • Authored the shared design system now standard across all IDOT applications: semantic light/dark tokens, component library, living styleguide, and Python CI gates enforcing WCAG 2.1 AA contrast, closing two defect classes that had reached production.
  • Reimplemented legacy email generation with byte-identical output and structured GeoJSON attachments, preserving every downstream agency integration at zero migration cost, with pytest and Vitest coverage.
  • Developed a Truck Parking System using JupyterLab to analyze 2,045 images and 7,603 polygons, optimizing parking occupancy detection.
  • Integrated the system with MAASTO TPIMS and the FHWA Accuracy & Archiving Project in 2026, ensuring compliance with federal standards and improving data reliability.
May 2026 — Present
UIC · Computer Science
Curriculum Developer & Teaching Assistant
CS 418 — Introduction to Data Science
  • Develop curriculum across the semester for an open-source data science course — lecture units spanning statistics review, probability and Bayes' theorem, data wrangling and quality, EDA, correlation, and linear regression — written as version-controlled Markdown and published as Quarto/Reveal.js decks at dodatascience.fun.
  • Build the original figures and typeset materials the course teaches from, including the reusable LaTeX worksheet template its practice worksheets are generated from.
  • Designed the Fall 2026 assessment architecture in PrairieLearn, mapping a 67-question bank onto 12 weekly homework assessments with topic zones and auto- and manually-graded point splits.
  • Serving as a teaching assistant for the course from August 2026.
Jan 2026 — May 2026
UIC · EDGES Lab
Undergraduate Research Assistant
UIC Department of Computer Science
  • Modeled oral bacterial predictors of immunosenescence and accelerated biological aging in NHANES 2009 data — 2,997 participants across 823 microbial taxa — under the advisement of Dr. Elena Zheleva.
  • Built the full analysis pipeline in Python and Pandas: centered log-ratio transformation of compositional count data, prevalence filtering to 119 taxa, and a leakage-safe train/test split with 5-fold cross-validated hyperparameter tuning.
  • Compared LASSO, logistic regression, random forest, and XGBoost with SHAP attribution, using FDR-corrected regression for significance testing and cross-model rank aggregation to separate stable signal from single-model artifacts.
Aug 2025 — May 2026
UIC · Computer Science
Teaching Assistant
UIC Department of Computer Science
  • Collaborated closely with the instructor on course logistics and designed assignments addressing ethical, social, and professional issues in computing.
  • Assisted on lectures for 50+ students focused on data privacy and algorithmic bias.
  • Evaluated and graded weekly assignments, providing detailed feedback to support student learning.
Jun 2024 — May 2026
Chicago, IL
IT Support Analyst
Technology Solutions
  • Provided technical support resolving software, hardware, and network connectivity issues, including troubleshooting Wi-Fi and VPN configurations.
  • Managed user accounts and access permissions using enterprise systems to ensure secure, compliant access.
  • Supported new staff onboarding by configuring accounts and devices, documenting all IT activities in TDX to improve asset management.
03

Teaching

Courses taught
Aug 2026 — Present

CS 418 — Introduction to Data Science

Teaching Assistant

Teaching from the curriculum I developed over the summer — supporting students across the semester's lecture units and weekly assessments.

May 2026 — Aug 2026

CS 418 — Introduction to Data Science

Curriculum Developer

Built the open-source curriculum unit by unit — lecture source, original figures, practice worksheets, and the PrairieLearn assessment architecture. Detailed below.

Aug 2025 — May 2026

CS 377 — Communication and Ethical Issues in Computing

Teaching Assistant

Communication skills for computing professionals — presentation organization, visual aides, delivery technique, and argument support — alongside ethical and societal issues in computing: privacy, intellectual property and ownership, and computer crime.

Featured — CS 418, in depth
University of Illinois Chicago

CS 418 — Introduction to Data Science

Curriculum Developer & Teaching Assistant · course led by Jack Bandy
Curriculum DeveloperMay 2026 — Present Teaching AssistantAug 2026 — Present

CS 418 is built in the open. Every lecture, figure, and worksheet is version-controlled source — Markdown and LaTeX rendered by Quarto into Reveal.js decks and PDFs, published by GitHub Actions on each push, and released CC BY-NC-SA.

I develop curriculum across the semester — the lecture source, the original figures, and the practice problems that go with them — unit by unit, as the course runs. I also designed the Fall 2026 assessment architecture in PrairieLearn, mapping a 67-question bank onto twelve weekly homework assessments.

Course site Course source
Full semesterof curriculum, developed unit by unit — ongoing
12weekly homework assessments in PrairieLearn
8+topic modules, stats review to regression
1,200+lines of slide & worksheet source
Units published so far — live decks, more in progress
Week 01

Intro & the Data Science Lifecycle

Revised the opening deck and wrote its quantitative core: statistics review, measures of spread and position, probability, and Bayes' theorem — plus two original figures on what data science is and where it sits.

Stats reviewSpread & positionProbabilityBayes
View slides Week 03

Wrangling, Filtering & Formats

What data wrangling actually is, how to discover and address quality issues in a real dataset, reshaping and joining, and filtering in Pandas — .loc[] and .query() side by side, with a worked application.

Data wranglingData qualityFilteringPandas
View slides Week 04

EDA & Descriptive Statistics

Exploratory data analysis as a habit rather than a checklist — descriptive statistics, distribution shape, and the questions worth asking of a dataset before any model is fit.

EDADescriptive statsDistributions
View slides Week 08

Correlation & Linear Regression

The correlation coefficient built up from scratch, illustrated with original figures for advertising-vs-sales and a strength-of-correlation panel, leading into simple linear regression — with a matching LaTeX worksheet.

CorrelationLinear regressionWorksheet
View slides
Beyond the slides
01 · Figures

Original SVG diagrams

Hand-built rather than screenshotted, so they stay crisp at projector scale and legible in print — an RGB Venn diagram, the role of data science, advertising vs. sales, a correlation-strengths panel, and more as new units land.

02 · Worksheets

The LaTeX worksheet template

The reusable template the course builds its practice worksheets from — consistent typography, problem numbering, and answer space, so writing a new worksheet is content rather than layout.

03 · Assessments

PrairieLearn assessment architecture

Restructured the Fall 2026 homework sequence: twelve weekly assessments defined in JSON, a 67-question bank reorganized into topic zones, and point allocations split across auto- and manually-graded parts.

Toolchain

QuartoReveal.jsMarkdownLaTeXSVGPythonPandasMatplotlibPrairieLearnJekyllGitHub ActionsGit

Course materials are released under CC BY-NC-SA. The toolchain above is specific to CS 418; see the timeline for the other courses I've assisted.

Projects

Chicago Traffic Camera Analysis

SQLite | Python | Pandas | Streamlit | Matplotlib

A decade of Chicago's automated traffic enforcement, taken from a raw city dataset to a published interactive dashboard. Querying it surfaced a 10× jump in speed tickets the month the city lowered its ticketing threshold — and that ten of 251 intersections account for a quarter of every violation issued.

Open the dashboard View on GitHub
Street map of Chicago and its near suburbs, the area covered by the camera network
251 intersections
23MViolations analyzed
549Cameras tracked
1.4MDaily records queried
10 yrsOf city data
05 · Research

Oral bacteria as predictors of biological aging

Undergraduate research at UIC, advised by Dr. Elena Zheleva. I analyzed the oral microbiomes of 2,997 adults from NHANES 2009 and compared four models to find which bacteria consistently predict immune aging.

Read the paper (PDF)
06

Skills & tools

Languages

PythonCC++JavaJavaScriptRSQLC#F#

Web Development

HTMLCSSReactNode.js

Data Science / ML

NumPyPandasScikit-learnXGBoostSciPyMatplotlib

Databases · Tools

MySQLSQLitePowerBIGitGitHub.NETVS CodeFigma
07

Leadership

Web Developer

Association for Computing Machinery

Develop and maintain chapter websites using HTML/CSS and JavaScript.

Aug 2024 — Present

Student Mentor

Women in Computer Science

Provide technical mentorship to CS students on programming concepts and coursework.

Jan 2026 — Present
08

Let's work together.

Open to data science, analytics, and software roles, research collaborations, and good conversations.

LinkedIn Email GitHub