About

Sarah Popelka is a data-driven problem solver and educator currently serving as the COVID Project Manager at the Alexandria Health Department. In this role, she plans, organizes, coordinates, and oversees COVID-19 response projects, including vaccine distribution, community testing events, epidemiological cluster analysis, and community outreach and COVID education programs. She is responsible for developing, recommending, and directing the implementation of short term COVID response plans, as well as long term resilience-building efforts. Sarah also evaluates the effectiveness of COVID response projects, streamlines/automates processes, and helps ensure that the City's pandemic response is equitable and just. Prior to her current role, Sarah served as a Program Analyst at the City of Alexandria, Virginia, where she used data to evaluate, streamline, and improve infrastructure, environmental, and transportation-related services within the City, with an emphasis on public works service delivery. Notable projects she worked on included maintaining the City's pavement management system, integrating data from numerous enterprise business applications to gain a holistic view of the department's operations, and long-term strategic planning for a data-driven operations management framework. Sarah is also a Teaching Assistant at the George Washington University - College of Professional Studies, where she assists in the instruction of a data analytics boot camp. The class covers a wide range of topics, from Excel and Python to advanced statistics and machine learning. Sarah prepares supplemental lectures and educational materials, reviews and reinforces class concepts for struggling students, and spends a majority of her time helping students debug their code and grading coding assignments. Sarah holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Geographic Information Science and Cartography from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her technical skills include test, infra, data engineering, AI, NLP, Python, and web development. With 5.61 years of relevant experience, Sarah is a highly skilled and knowledgeable data professional with a passion for using data to solve complex problems and improve outcomes.