Los Angeles, CA, 90025
909-573-4605 | darrenfishell@protonmail.com | LinkedIn | GitHub
THE GIST
Data scientist and business intelligence expert with extensive experience in data visualization using Tableau and Power BI, and strong SQL skills. Successfully led projects involving data modeling, building data pipelines, and delivering insights that drive business decisions. Notable achievements include developing COVID-19 tracking dashboards and enhancing data access frameworks. Eager to leverage expertise in data science and strong writing and journalism background to contribute to innovative solutions.
WORK HISTORY
Baker Newman Noyes
Jun 2021 - Apr 2025
Business Intelligence Analyst | Business Intelligence Manager • Portland, ME
• Founded BI practice at 350-person professional services firm, growing monthly user adoption of BI reports to 70 percent within three years
• Worked with cross-functional teams to define data quality standards and metrics and reports for key stakeholders in Finance, Operations, IT, Tax, Audit, and Advisory practices
• Analyzed thousands of lines of SQL Server stored procedures to build unified semantic layer for STAR Practice Management system and Business Central ERP
• Provided tax managers at-a-glance workload estimates for their teams, allowing them to quickly identify over-assigned tax staff and redistribute work during the height of busy season
• Designed and supported self-service data access framework built upon core semantic model, democratizing data access in Excel and Fabric
• Led daily standups and Agile development process for BI and Business Applications team, including external vendors, resulting in improved team collaboration and project delivery efficiency
Arkatechture
Nov 2018 - Jun 2021
Data Visualization Analyst | Senior Consultant • Portland, ME
• For shoe and apparel brand Cole Haan, built and developed inventory tracking reports and regional sales trend reports, including e-commerce activity, using SQL views in Snowflake and Tableau front-end
• Built Maine CDC’s public-facing COVID-19 tracking dashboards and data pipeline at the height of the pandemic, work generated from a side project on my personal website
• For digital giftcard company Virtual Incentives, built core reporting on digital gifting trends across various partner retailers, highlighting emerging areas of growth
• Led Tableau training and workshops for BI development teams at L.L.Bean and Arkatechture’s direct credit union clients
• Oversaw analysts and visualization development for regional coffee retailer, including market basket analysis and general sales trend reporting from point-of-sale system
Bangor Daily News
Apr 2014 - Oct 2018
Investigative and Data Reporter • Portland, ME
• Covered Maine’s economy and business news, including special beats covering Maine’s Public Utilities Commission and regulated utilities, as well as complex Ch. 11 bankruptcy reorganizations.
• Conducted analysis of retail electricity pricing that led to a $14 million class-action settlement and established methodology validated and adopted by state regulators for analyzing this market.
• Built interactive data visualizations to communicate complex economic trends and enhance investigations of property records and court filings, including a major investigation linking business owners to an alleged money laundering and medical marijuana diversion scheme.
• Developed automated pipelines to track campaign finance data, creating transparency around political influence in state politics and complex analysis that linked together lobbying expenditures, campaign contributions and outside spending.
SKILLS
• Data Platform Management: Product Ownership (Power BI), Requirements Analysis, Data Quality Assurance, Stakeholder Management
• Technical Implementation: SQL, dbt, dlt, Python, APIs, Web Scraping (BeautifulSoup, Playwright), AWS Lambda, ETL/ELT Pipelines, Data Validation
• Business Intelligence: Tableau (6+ yrs), Power BI (4+ yrs), Dashboard Design, Self-Service Analytics, Financial/Operational Reporting
• Team and Project Management: Agile/Scrum Master, Sprint Planning, JIRA, Technical Mentoring, Training Delivery
EDUCATION
Northeastern University - Roux Institute
Jan 2020 - Jan 2024
M.S., Data Science • Portland, ME
• Coursework: Studied supervised and unsupervised machine learning techniques, including regression, model development and evaluation, clustering, NLP and large language model architectures.
Bowdoin College
Jan 2005 - Jan 2009
B.A., English, Minor Italian • Brunswick, ME
PROJECTS
Cost analysis for Maine’s residential retail electricity suppliers
Portland, Maine • Jan 2015 — Present
Developed a data pipeline and framework for comparing cost of Maine’s retail electricity supplier prices to the state’s standard offer. This framework was validated and adopted by the Maine Public Utilities Commission in their own study. The analysis revealed Maine customers could have saved $180.5 million from 2012-2024. Initial analysis at the Bangor Daily News was done manually and visualized in Tableau. The updated project uses dlt for data ingestion, dbt for transformations and the Observable Framework to display interactive visualizations.
Bias detection in Paycheck Protection Program funding
Portland, Maine • Jan 2022 — Jun 2022
Identified statistically significant biases in PPP loan distribution during COVID-19 by integrating multiple data sources and applying regression modeling that controlled for confounding variables including rural-urban differences and industry concentration.
Group project originally written in R and refactored in Python within above repository.
Newspaper jobs in freefall
Portland, Maine • August 2025
Formalized a data pipeline for statewide payroll jobs data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages. This project includes visualizations highlighting particular trends within newspaper publishing jobs, a subject I previously reported on for the Maine Monitor.
Semantic similarity analysis in Maine legislative testimony
Portland, Maine • Sep 2024 — Present
Built end-to-end pipeline for 20,000+ bills with semantic clustering (0.535 silhouette score) and vector embedding system for 3.6M sentences using HuggingFace transformers. Created vector search in DuckDB for real-time similarity queries, enabling analysis of testimony influence patterns for Sierra Club advocacy.
Improving data quality and data model for healthcare client deliverables: Crossover and Disproportionate Share Hospital reporting
Portland, Maine • Jan 2024 — Dec 2025
Refactored brittle Perl/VBA pipeline with Python ETL for Medicare EDI 835 files and PDF remittance advice, implementing pattern-based extraction, DuckDB storage, and SQL view transformations. Cut annual development costs by 90% while improving modularity, speed and data quality.