Leadership Team

Meredith Rocchi (she/her)

Currently on sabbatical leave until June 30, 2027

Principal Investigator, Co-Founder, and Lead, Data Communication Cluster
Associate Professor, Faculty of Arts

Meredith Rocchi is an award-winning quantitative methods professor with research expertise in effective interpersonal communication, measurement validation, and data literacy education. She is passionate about data and statistics and sharing this passion with her students. She is committed to teaching excellence through reducing the stigma surrounding methods courses, making quantitative methods education more accessible, and helping alleviate students’ anxiety towards math and numbers. As an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Ottawa, Meredith is overseeing a large multi-year SSHRC-Funded project (The Data Literacy Project) aimed at improving quantitative methods courses for students in the humanities and social sciences.

Christopher Gravel (he/him)

Co-Founder and Lead, Data Methodology
Associate Professor, Faculty of Medicine

Christopher Gravel obtained his Ph.D. (2015) and M.Sc. (2009) in Probability and Statistics from the School of Mathematics and Statistics at Carleton University. He then completed a post-doctoral fellowship in biostatistics in 2017 at the Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Occupational Health at McGill University. Prior to joining the School of Epidemiology and Public Health at the University of Ottawa as an assistant professor in 2021, Christopher was a senior epidemiologist and biostatistician at Health Canada where he focused on the use of real-world evidence to support regulatory decision-making. Christopher’s research program focuses on the development and improvement of statistical methods for pharmacoepidemiology and pharmacovigilance. He has interests in methods for causal inference, measurement error models, and the analysis of real-world observational studies with applications using large administrative healthcare databases. Christopher has explored validation sampling approaches to correct for outcome misclassification in binary and time-to-event data and is currently focused on the development of simultaneous systematic bias correction methods. He is also interested in disproportionality analysis for signal detection in spontaneous reporting data and other drug and vaccine safety surveillance methodologies.

Felicity Tayler (she/her)

Co-Founder and Lead, Data Equity Cluster
Librarian, University of Ottawa

Felicity Tayler’s research interests include metadata modeling, data visualization and the print culture of literary and poetic community. Felicity holds a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Humanities from Concordia University (2016); prior to joining the University of Ottawa as the Research Data Management Librarian, Felicity was a Faculty of Arts and Sciences Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History of Art at the University of Toronto (Jan. 2017-Sept. 2018). She is currently the PI on an SSHRC RDM Capacity Building Initiative grant, developing a Data Primer for RDM in Digital Humanities.

Felicity is also a co-applicant on the SSHRC-funded SpokenWeb partnership, which foregrounds a coordinated and collaborative approach to literary historical study and digital development, with diverse collections of spoken recordings from across Canada and beyond. Felicity is an active member of the Digital Research Alliance of Canada National Training Expert Group.