Data Days CLE 2026 (Conference Day): Full Schedule

10:00am EDT

From Data to Story: Designing Visualizations That Drive Understanding

Thursday October 15, 2026 10:00am - 10:50am EDT

Data alone rarely changes minds. Stories do. In this session, participants will learn how visualization transforms data into understanding by directing attention to meaningful insights. Through examples and practical guidance, we'll explore visual perception, effective chart design, common pitfalls, and storytelling techniques that help audiences quickly grasp and act on the information that matters most.

Speakers

Zachary Morgan

Director, Institutional Research + Effectiveness

Zachary Morgan is a leader in institutional research and analytics, dedicated to advancing data-informed decision-making and institutional effectiveness in higher education. He has led strategic planning, accreditation, enrollment management, and student success initiatives, driving... Read More →

Thursday October 15, 2026 10:00am - 10:50am EDT
Auditorium (Basement) 525 Superior Ave, Cleveland, OH 44114, USA

Data Curious

11:00am EDT

Lightning Session 1: Rolling the Dice: Consecutive and Concurrent Sentencing in Cuyahoga County

Thursday October 15, 2026 11:00am - 11:10am EDT

Legacy Room (1st Floor)

A judge's choice between consecutive and concurrent sentences can add years to a defendant's incarceration. Using Cuyahoga County sentencing data, I look at how frequently judges make that choice and how much their behavior varies. Even after restricting the analysis to very similar cases, some judges impose consecutive sentences dramatically more often than others. This lightning talk shows how a simple pattern in the data can open the door to deeper questions about consistency, discretion, and decision-making in the courts.

Speakers

Brian Mikelbank

Associate Professor, Cleveland State University

Brian Mikelbank is a faculty member at Cleveland State University and a Visiting Scholar at the Legal Aid Society of Cleveland. A quantitative urban geographer by training, he uses data analysis to study patterns and processes shaping cities and metropolitan regions. His research... Read More →

Thursday October 15, 2026 11:00am - 11:10am EDT
Legacy Room (1st Floor) 525 Superior Ave, Cleveland, OH 44114, USA

Data Curious

11:00am EDT

From Youth Voice to Measurable Impact

Thursday October 15, 2026 11:00am - 11:50am EDT

Auditorium (Basement)

How can authentic youth voice become meaningful impact data? Discover how Youth Opportunities Unlimited built an organization-wide impact framework and brought it to life through pre- and post-program video reflections. Explore our process for developing rubrics, analyzing growth in career readiness, confidence, and self-reflection, and turning youth stories into actionable insights - without losing the voices behind the data.

Speakers

Molly Feghali

Director of Training, Learning & Impact

Dr. Molly Feghali serves as the Director of Training, Learning & Impact at Youth Opportunities Unlimited (Y.O.U.), where she leads the organization's career-connected learning strategy, curriculum development, and impact measurement. She oversees a team of facilitators delivering... Read More →

Hayat Lachheb

Career Readiness Facilitator

Hayat Lachheb is a Career Readiness Facilitator with the Planning and Career Readiness (PACE) team at Youth Opportunities Unlimited (Y.O.U). She is dedicated to helping connect high school students to meaningful career pathways through structured lessons, career advising, and work-based... Read More →

Elizabeth Wilden

Learning & Impact Specialist

Elizabeth Wilden is a Learning & Impact Specialist at Youth Opportunities Unlimited (Y.O.U.), where she transforms program data into meaningful insights that support decision-making and demonstrate impact. Her work focuses on evaluation, data analysis, reporting, and dashboard development... Read More →

Thursday October 15, 2026 11:00am - 11:50am EDT
Auditorium (Basement) 525 Superior Ave, Cleveland, OH 44114, USA

Data Curious

11:10am EDT

Lightning Session 1: Before You Trust the Number: Five Questions Every Citizen Should Ask About Civic Data

Thursday October 15, 2026 11:10am - 11:20am EDT

Civic data can inform better decisions—but only if we know how to question it. This lightning talk gives everyday citizens five simple questions to ask before accepting a number at face value: who collected it, who is missing, what is being measured, compared with what, and how presentation shapes interpretation. Attendees will leave with a practical framework for reading civic data with curiosity, context, and confidence.

Speakers

Jacquelineo Ruiz

Jacqueline Ruiz is a historian, educator, and researcher based in Cleveland. Her work has focused on making complex information understandable and helping people engage more confidently with history, institutions, and public life. She holds a master’s degree in U.S. History and... Read More →

Thursday October 15, 2026 11:10am - 11:20am EDT

Data Curious

11:20am EDT

Lightning Session 1: Planning Public Land One Vote, One Parcel at a Time

Thursday October 15, 2026 11:20am - 11:30am EDT

Legacy Room (1st Floor)

Cleveland holds more public land than at any point in its history. Planning at the city or neighborhood scale dilutes local knowledge into general recommendations that need further planning to implement. This session covers current engagement shortfalls, the City's Groundtruthing pilot, and a live demonstration of a prototype where stakeholders vote parcel by parcel to create land use recommendations in a continuous, democratic framework. Attendees will vote on real Cleveland parcels, followed by an open discussion about how this could work at scale.

Speakers

Tim Dehm

Planning and Design Specialist, Western Reserve Land Conservancy

Tim Dehm is a Planning and Design Specialist at Western Reserve Land Conservancy, where he uses his background in landscape architecture and city planning to develop planning frameworks to guide site selection, conducts parcel-level assessment, and leads landscape design, implementation... Read More →

Thursday October 15, 2026 11:20am - 11:30am EDT
Legacy Room (1st Floor) 525 Superior Ave, Cleveland, OH 44114, USA

Data Curious

2:30pm EDT

Lightning Session 2: Visualizing the Universe on the Wall

Thursday October 15, 2026 2:30pm - 2:40pm EDT

Legacy Room (1st Floor)

A new exhibit at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History required the scale of the universe to be visualized on a wall illustration – from the scale of galaxies, to the scale of the Earth. This talk discusses the strategy I used to relate this scale information in a single image.

Speakers

Peter Hedman

Data Visualization Analyst

Peter Hedman has worked at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History since 2018, where his work spans data engineering, analytics, and IT infrastructure. He began by creating and presenting planetarium shows and is now building a new ETL system to enable easier and better reporting... Read More →

Thursday October 15, 2026 2:30pm - 2:40pm EDT
Legacy Room (1st Floor) 525 Superior Ave, Cleveland, OH 44114, USA

Data Curious

2:30pm EDT

Building community capacity to address brain health through increased access to local data

Thursday October 15, 2026 2:30pm - 3:20pm EDT

Conference Room C (2nd Floor)

The Cuyahoga County Board of Health will share steps taken to increase organizational and community partner capacity to understand and advance the brain health of Cuyahoga County residents. Learn how the agency developed internal expertise, identified community needs and strengths, and increased access to local data on brain health through the development of various data products including a dashboard, fact sheets, and social media to support health equity and data-driven decision making.

Speakers

Sarah Szabo

Data Analyst, Cuyahoga County Board of Health

Sarah Szabo, MSSA, is a data analyst with the Cuyahoga County Board of Health (CCBH) based in Parma, Ohio. During her seven years in this role, she has been heavily involved in primary and secondary data analyses, as well as assisting with collaborative community health improvement... Read More →

Thursday October 15, 2026 2:30pm - 3:20pm EDT
Conference Room C (2nd Floor)

Data Curious

2:30pm EDT

Visualizing Development Data in Three Dimensions: How Leveraging Cross-Sector Partnerships Can Help a Powerful Tool to Evolve

Thursday October 15, 2026 2:30pm - 3:20pm EDT

Auditorium (Basement)

The Cleveland Development Model is a living, collaborative, civic data platform that combines geographic information systems (GIS), 3D modeling, urban planning, and economic development data into a single system. Originally developed by City Architecture in collaboration with Greater Cleveland Partnership, this fully interactive online tool was created to illustrate the investments taking place and relate them to each other to demonstrate the area’s momentum and potential for the development community, funders, and other decision-makers. Now, through a new partnership with Kent State University's Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative, the goal is to leverage the university’s academic and research resources to enhance the tool with additional features and future growth scenarios.

Speakers

Michael Hawkins

Professor of Geography

As a research data librarian, Michael's role is in supporting researchers throughout the data lifecycle. His responsibilities include providing training and consultation on research data management best practices, developing data services, and providing data literacy workshops and... Read More →

Allison Lukacsy-Love

Director

Allison Lukacsy-Love, AIA, AICP, is a licensed architect and certified city planner dedicated to equitable redevelopment of the built environment. Before her appointment with the Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative, she was the Managing Director of Major Projects at the Greater Cleveland... Read More →

Krysta Pesarchick

Senior City Planner

Krysta is an urban designer and city planner who has been involved with a wide variety of architecture and planning projects of varying sizes. She rises to the challenge of looking at every project from different scales to develop creative design solutions. Her communication, organization... Read More →

Thursday October 15, 2026 2:30pm - 3:20pm EDT
Auditorium (Basement) 525 Superior Ave, Cleveland, OH 44114, USA

Data Curious

2:40pm EDT

Lightning Session 2: How do we capture our collective stories, can AI help?

Thursday October 15, 2026 2:40pm - 2:50pm EDT

Data is less powerful without the stories that connect it and connect us. For most, our family stories sit in old photo libraries or in the histories passed down by family members. Traditional archivists were reserved for the very famous, or wealthy (or both). What if we used digital archivists to collect and store stories across all of our communities. How might we co-create and build on a prototype that I've developed using Claude that uses natural Q&A (spoken/typed or variable) to capture a family story or stories. Using "storycorp" as a grounding for understanding what this can be - but making it accessible simply with a browser and universally available.

Speakers

Matthew Lehman

Digital enthusiast, past Chief Digital Officer at Westfield, Currently leading fin serv team for RingCentral and owner of FootballNews365, a news and information app company built for soccer fans worldwide.

Thursday October 15, 2026 2:40pm - 2:50pm EDT

Data Curious

3:00pm EDT

Lightning Session 2: Cleveland Lead Data Public Health Data

Thursday October 15, 2026 3:00pm - 3:10pm EDT

Legacy Room (1st Floor)

This session dives into the blood lead screening and testing data that informs the lead poisoning prevention efforts in Cleveland. The sessions provides context on the systems currently in place within Cleveland, summarizing the different roles the City of Cleveland and community partners have in responding to and preventing lead poisoning. We then discuss the lead screening and testing data and how it is sourced, prepared, reported, and used. We will also discuss the Lead Program at Cleveland Department of Public Health, which houses the lead investigators and Lead Safe Certifications team.

Speakers

Claudia Meister

Lead Program Manager

Claudia Meister

Vinh Trinh

Epidemiologist, City of Cleveland

Vinh Trình has been an Epidemiologist with Cleveland Department of Public Health for 6 years, focusing on lead poisoning and sexually transmitted infections. He received his Bachelor of Science degree in Biology from John Carroll University and his Master of Public Health degree... Read More →

Thursday October 15, 2026 3:00pm - 3:10pm EDT
Legacy Room (1st Floor) 525 Superior Ave, Cleveland, OH 44114, USA

Data Curious

3:30pm EDT

C-C-C Combo Breaker - what you can do with open government data, NGOs, and library resources

Thursday October 15, 2026 3:30pm - 4:20pm EDT

Conference Room B (2nd Floor)

Nothing is perfect - including data sets. How do you try to put all the pieces together to complete the picture? Where are those pieces anyway? In this session, we'll explore open civic/government data sets, non-profit research, and Cleveland Public Library online resources to to help complete the puzzle and and make sure we can get all those pieces in place.

Speakers

Lisa Sanchez

Map Collection Librarian, Cleveland Public Library

Sarah Dobransky

General Research Collections Manager, Cleveland Public Library

Sarah Dobransky is the General Research Collections manager at Cleveland, which is a fancy title for manager of the science, business, and government departments. In 2015 she made the leap from academic to public librarian, and quickly fell in love with the civic data she used on... Read More →

Thursday October 15, 2026 3:30pm - 4:20pm EDT
Conference Room B (2nd Floor) 525 Superior Ave, Cleveland, OH 44114, USA

Data Curious

10:00am EDT

11:00am EDT

11:00am EDT

11:10am EDT

11:20am EDT

2:30pm EDT

2:30pm EDT

2:30pm EDT

2:40pm EDT

3:00pm EDT

3:30pm EDT

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