Mark Pedigo, PhD
Technical Educator | Developer Advocate | Applied Data Scientist
PhD Mathematician. A decade in Data Science. Extensive teaching experience. Data Camp author.
mark.pedigo@gmail.com LinkedIn YouTube GitHub
Most working data scientists don't spend years in the classroom. Most math professors don't spend a decade as a working data scientist. And neither typically write online tutorials and courses that reach thousands of developers. I ended up doing all three.
In the mid-90s I scripted SCUMM code for adventure games at Humongous Entertainment. In the games, kids navigated puzzles, made choices, and learned without knowing they were learning. The company is gone now, but the problem it posed never left me. How do you take something complex and make it feel natural?
After a stint teaching at community colleges, I earned my doctorate. While finishing my dissertation at Saint Louis University, I taught Differential Equations to engineering students at Washington University. Afterwards, I spent a decade at Wash U's University College, the evening extension school, where my classroom included everyone from medical researchers and librarians to the drivers who transport live organs. Teaching people of wildly different backgrounds taught me how to meet people where they are.
In parallel I built a career as a data scientist in healthcare, government, and tech, including work at Booz Allen Hamilton (subcontracting for NASA), and various healthcare analytics firms.
I write courses and technical articles, and evaluate LLMs for mathematical reasoning. My Data Camp class has a rating of 4.7/5. I also produce technical Python tutorial videos at youtube.com/@MathyPython.
The throughline is always translation: make the complex intelligible.
