Peter Gates
PhD, Biomedical Science; Data Engineer Manager at Join Parachute
__
Education
2017 - 2021
- PhD. Biomedical Science (Exercise Physiology), Kent State University, OH
2015 - 2017
- M.S. Biology, University of Akron, OH
2007 - 2012
- B.S. Exercise Science (Exercise Physiology), Premed, Kent State University, OH
- Minor in Psychology, Kent State University, OH
Work Experience
2025 - present
- Data Engineer Manager, Join Parachute (Remote)
- Grew and lead a data engineering team, hiring and mentoring engineers and analysts — including growing a non-technical transfer into a production Python contributor within 8 months
- Directed AI adoption across the data organization: shipped an AI-assisted compliance-review tool that cut review cycle time from 12 to 7 days, and measured roughly 2x task throughput per sprint from AI-assisted workflows
- Led remediation of a company-wide access-control gap, redesigning role-based permissions and driving migration off a legacy low-code platform onto an internally built framework, as the company scaled from roughly 50 to 1,200+ employees across 50 locations
- Shipped major releases of the Unit Verification Report (UVR) and its downstream applications, expanding coverage to additional customers (4 companies onboarded, some international)
- Led the deployment of mobile-first internal tools used daily across dozens of company locations — owning scope and design and staying involved through user testing, validation, and rollout
- Architected a three-repo ML system (NCR Coach/Classy) for compliance-document review; combined NCR rejection rate fell 27.9% → 11.5% (−58.8% relative) post-launch, with AI evaluation coverage rising from 0% to 100% across 50 facilities — results presented by the Director of QA to company leadership as proof the tool worked (134 users, 887 NCRs reviewed)
- Built the data engineering pod from scratch: wrote the job requisition, screened candidates, authored the technical interview, and onboarded two engineers, each with 30-60-90 plans and ongoing 1:1s
- Shipped 12 major UVR versions into production (Jan 2025 – Mar 2026), onboarding a new customer with nearly every release; grew code review volume from 4 (2024) to 134 (2026 YTD) as ownership shifted from building to leading a growing team
- Led the Whole Blood Collections Phase 2 program from April 2026, architecting its initial workflow before handing off execution to a teammate upon completion (September 2026)
2023 - 2025
- Senior Data Scientist, Join Parachute (Austin, TX / Remote)
- Migrated 100+ data validation tests from Snowflake to dbt across multiple enterprise customer workflows, improving reliability and consistency
- Built automated, customer-specific shipment validation workflows (GitHub Actions, Snowflake, Python) and a predictive-analytics dataset for customer supply forecasting
- Onboarded 3 additional customers/programs onto the UVR; built automations alerting internal teams to compliance and pipeline errors
- Worked closely with the validation team, advising on UVR validation requirements as the company scaled roughly 150% year-over-year
- Built the Orphan Unit Program (data pipeline, BI reporting, Streamlit app, and validation) and the Corporate Directives feature (a new compliance model threaded through UVR, uvr_mart, dataverse, and SVA reporting) end to end; modularized UVR’s rules engine to support new customer- and product-specific plasma types
- Delivered a same-day customer shipment-file fix a manager praised as “lightyears ahead” of typical turnaround, and served as the go-to resolution authority during multiple company-wide reporting-system outages
2022 - 2023
- Data Scientist, Join Parachute (Austin, TX)
- Built the compliance algorithms determining eligibility to ship regulated product — the origin of the Unit Verification Report (UVR)
- Led the rollout of a digital health-questionnaire system, moving manual paper-based review to a SQL-based QA tool
- Identified and fixed a data bug causing non-compliant shipments, and caught fraudulent appointment filings at company locations
- Built automations for customer electronic shipment file generation and shipment record reporting
- Built the automated reporting pipeline for PPTA federal viral-reporting submissions (semiannual/annual viral counts, NAT/serology labeling, coinfection classification), including an audit-ready suite built to spec for a live FDA assessment (July 2023)
- Built donor acquisition funnel analytics to track and improve conversion across the donation pipeline
- Partnered with the Quality department to encode three controlled SOPs and federal shipment regulations into automated compliance logic, replacing a manual review workstream and earning a company-wide shoutout for eliminating “hundreds of hours of review work”
- Migrated the compliance reporting system onto Snowflake and fully automated it; built the company’s first GitHub repository, still in active use four years later
2021 - 2022
- Software Engineer (Contract), Galileo (Remote)
- Replaced a manual, error-prone workflow for deploying BigQuery tables from SQL stored in a Jupyter notebook with a web GUI for initializing databases and tables, including unit testing and schema/data verification
- Technologies: Google BigQuery, Python, SQL
Certifications
2021
- Data Scientist in Python (Dataquest)
- Data Analyst in Python (Dataquest)
- Machine Learning Intermediate with Python (Dataquest)
2020
- Data Scientist with Python (Datacamp)
2019
- Data Scientist with R (Datacamp)
Awards
2020
- Graduate Student Abstract Award, Brain Health Research Institute, Kent, OH
2011 - 2012
- Graduated Cum Laude, Kent State University, Kent, OH
- President’s List, Kent State University, Kent, OH
2008 - 2011
- Dean’s List, Kent State University, Kent, OH
Research Experience
2018 - 2021
- Effects of dance on Parkinsonian symptoms.
- Determining optimal settings on the dynamic bike.
2017
- Effect of induced glaucoma in mice on the visual cortex.
2015 - 2017
- Effects of bisphenol A on overweight zebrafish undergoing an exercise regime.
Data Science Experience
2021
- Development of a mixed model to maximize outcomes in dynamic bike studies (Dissertation)
- Feature engineering from twitch chat using custom algorithms and NLP (Pillar)
- Implementation of machine learning pipeline (Pillar)
- Automation of dynamic bike file output analysis workflow
2020
- Parkinsonian tremor entropy calculator
- Covid dashboard and dash builder
- Receipt parser and venmo requestor
2019
- Dance limb movement entropy calculator
- Dynamic bike raw output file formatter
Publications
2022
- Gates, Peter; Ridgel L., Angela. 2022. Evaluation of demographic variables as predictors of motor symptoms in Parkinson’s disease after dynamic cycling. Frontiers in Rehabilitation Sciences. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fresc.2022.858401.
- Gates, Peter; Discenzo M., Fred; Kim, Jin Hyun; Lemke, Zack; Meggitt, Joan; Ridgel L., Angela. 2022. Analysis of movement entropy during community dance programs for people with Parkinson’s Disease and older adults: A cohort study. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. 19(2):655. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19020655.
2020
- Lemke, Zachary C; Gates, Peter; Kim, Jin Hyun; Discenzo, Fred; Ridgel, Angela L. 2020. Sample entropy analysis of dance interventions in people with Parkinson’s disease and older adults. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, 52(7S), 852–852. https://doi.org/10.1249/01.mss.0000684736.66069.a7.
2013
- Lepp, Andrew; Barkley E., Jacob; Sanders J., Gabriel; Rebold, Michael; Gates, Peter. 2013. The relationship between cell phone use, physical and sedentary activity, and cardiorespiratory fitness in a sample of U.S. college students. International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity 10 (1): 79. https://doi.org/10.1186/1479-5868-10-79.
Presentations
2021
- Development of a model to predict outcomes after dynamic cycling in people with Parkinson’s disease
- Presentation of dissertation at Kent State University’s Brain and Health Research Institute
- Examining the link between sleep disturbance and physical activity in Parkinson’s disease
- Helped undergraduate with evaluation and calculation of statistics, results were presented at Kent State University’s Undergraduate Research Symposium
- Creation of a new model that may predict performance on the SMART dynamic bike in people with Parkinson’s disease
- Research poster at the 35th Annual Graduate Research Symposium
- Optimization of the SMART dynamic bike to improve motor function in Parkinson’s disease
- Research poster at the Society for Neuroscience’s (SfN) Annual Conference
- Parkinson’s disease, dance, and dynamic cycling
- Presentation at Kent State University’s Biomedical Sciences Student Advisory Council Datablitz
- Optimization of the SMART dynamic bike to improve motor function in Parkinson’s
disease
- Accepted Research Poster will be presented at the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) conference in June 2021.
2020
- Optimization of the SMART dynamic bike to improve motor function in Parkinson’s disease
- Research poster at the Brain Health Research Institute’s (BHRI) Eigth Annual Neuroscience Symposium
2019
- Sample entropy analysis of dance interventions in people with Parkinson’s disease and older adults
- Research poster at the South East Regional International Society for Computational Biology symposium
- Optimizing dance interventions to improve motor function in people with Parkinson’s disease and older adults
- Research poster at the Cleveland Brain Health Initiative
- Optimizing dance interventions to improve motor function in people with Parkinson’s disease and older adults
- Research poster at Kent State University’s Seventh Annual Neuroscience Symposium
Teaching Experience
2017 - 2021
- BSCI, social science and math tutor for Athletics Department at Kent State University
- Fall 2019, Spring 2020, Fall 2020, Spring 2021
- Human Anatomy, Teaching assistant at Kent State University
- Spring 2019, Spring 2020, Spring 2021
- Anatomy and Physiology I, Teaching assistant at Kent State University
- Fall 2019, Fall 2020
- Foundations in Biology, Teaching assistant at Kent State University
- Fall 2017, Spring 2018, Fall 2018
- NEOREMA instructor at Kent State University
- Summer 2019
2015 - 2017
- Anatomy and Physiology I, Teaching assistant at the University of Akron
- Fall 2015, Fall 2016
- Anatomy and Physiology II, Teaching assistant at the University of Akron
- Spring 2016, Spring 2017
2011 - 2012
- English, Chemistry, Biology, Psychology Independent tutor
- Substitute teacher’s assistant at Kent State University’s Child Development Center
2006 - 2012
- Sunday school teacher and assistant at Riverwood Community Chapel
Skills
- Data platforms & tools: Snowflake, dbt, Sigma Computing, Power BI, Python, SQL, GitHub Actions, Pipedream, SharePoint/Power Automate
- Leadership: People management and mentorship, hiring, project management across cross-functional teams, executive communication, relationship building across departments
Clinical Experience
2013 - 2015
- Medical school clinical rotations 60 hours
2010 - 2012
- Physician shadowing 70 hours
2008 - 2010
- Nursing clinical rotations 200 hours