Xuejing Duan, Ph.D.

A welcoming, adept, and conscientious data analyst who applies her skills with data to interdisciplinary studies.

Welcoming | Adept | Conscientious: An interdisciplinary researcher and educator, Xuejing Duan wants every student to know that they can accomplish many things with data analytics. Before joining the faculty of the graduate program in Data Analytics at McDaniel, Duan was a biostatistician at George Washington University. She now teaches courses in machine learning, Python programming, and the fundamentals of data science. Duan has a master’s degree in Data Analysis and Applied Statistics and a Ph.D. in Educational Statistics and Research Methods from Virginia Tech. She holds a second master’s degree in Assessment and Evaluation from the University of Akron.
Your background is in education, so what made you pursue data analytics?: I really like teaching. But I also do lots of research in education, and when I first began working with data, I realized that I needed to learn statistics to analyze it. No matter if you are in the field of education, or psychology, or computer science, most researchers need data and the latest skills to conduct their research. We need to know how to collect data from many sources and then run models that will tell us stories about the theory or patterns behind that data.
What do you hope students will take away from your courses in Data Analytics?: Learning is a lifelong process, and as an educator, my main responsibility is to break the big concepts down into bite-size parts so students can feel confident about working with statistics in the future, in any type of career.
How does the study of data analytics enrich the liberal arts?: In the Data Analytics program, we are not only providing quantitative processes, but also qualitative processes. Students in any major can use data analytics skills to find patterns in their research, whether it’s analyzing numbers or keywords. For my own research, I’ve worked with people of many backgrounds, in diverse fields like public health and education, to make important discoveries. I’ve recently collaborated on projects focused on HIV prevention and nutrition during the pandemic.

Directory Profile for Xuejing Duan

Hobbies

A lover of fiction, she reads up to 40 books a year in her free time.

Food

She loves to eat very spicy foods.

Business

She runs a small consultation business called DataAnalyBits.

Xuejing Duan, Ph.D.

About Prof. Duan

Outside of the Classroom