About

I spent six years as co-founder and COO of Indiegraf, helping build a platform used by more than 180 independent news publishers across North and Latin America. I’m now transitioning into a Strategic Advisor role focused on data strategy, while continuing to serve on Indiegraf’s Board. Before Indiegraf, I led digital and data journalism at The Discourse, and I’ve worked as an investigative journalist and data journalist, including recognition through the Edward R. Murrow Award and as a Knight Foundation International Data Journalism Award finalist.

My academic background is in mathematics, statistics, and environmental science, including a Master of Resource Management from Simon Fraser University, where I worked with a quantitative fisheries research group. I’ve also taught at UBC as an adjunct professor. That quantitative foundation, combined with years of executive experience in a data-driven business, is what led me toward data strategy: I understand both the business questions worth asking and the technical work required to answer them.

Recent credentials:

• Berkeley Executive Education, Data Strategy
• BrainStation Data Science Certificate

Technical stack I work in:

Python, SQL, BigQuery, dbt, Fivetran, Airbyte, Google Cloud Platform (including Cloud Functions, Scheduler and Secret Manager), Streamlit, scikit-learn. Comfortable building and integrating against REST APIs, including LLM APIs like Gemini for automated summarization.

If you’re working on a data strategy problem, I’d like to hear about it — reach me by email at hello@caitlinhavlak.com.