March is Women’s History Month, a time to celebrate women’s contributions to history, culture, and society. At JMP, we’re fortunate to have some amazing women working across the division.
Celebrating JMP Women is a series where we profile select women who are making a difference.
Today we celebrate Shannon Conners, Director of JMP DevOps. Shannon’s group helps produce, test, document, and facilitate translation of JMP software. Shannon loves JMP so much she can’t seem to leave it at the office. In her free time, Shannon uses JMP to visualize and even blog about her own activity monitor, diet and fitness data.
Let’s learn more about Shannon.
What inspired you to pursue a STEM career? Is there a moment, early in your life or academic career that pushed you in that direction?
I am the oldest of three daughters. My dad is an electrical engineer and my mother is a teacher, so I always had lots of science books growing up. When I was young, I was always the kid putting together McDonald’s toys without instructions because I enjoyed learning how to do it myself. Later on, I enjoyed building models and painting them, and fortunately I did start to read directions!
When I was in third grade, I became obsessed with reading about astronomy and space travel. That year, I did a science fair project on the solar system and started watching the original Star Trek series (on VCR tapes borrowed from a family friend). I followed that with science fair projects (with associated models I built) on the Apollo program, and the Space Shuttle. In sixth grade, I did a project on DNA fingerprinting and I was hooked. My interest in inner space continued through middle and high school, taking the required biology, chemistry, physics and math courses. I also took AP bio and designed an independent study in genetics.
I had an opportunity to work in two labs as part of a science internship program as a senior. One was in a physiology lab run by Dr. Marie Sauro at the Masonic Medical Research lab in Utica and the other in Dr. “Doc” Larry Aaronson’s fungal genetics lab at Utica College. Doc had mentored many young scientists over the years and encouraged them all to pursue higher education and jobs in the sciences. Numerous women alums from his lab worked in academia and industry, and he published papers with students as collaborators. This made a big impression on me.
Tell us a little more about your professional journey before you joined JMP
After high school, I attended Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, MA. I began to consider Mount Holyoke after reading that this relatively small college (~2000 students, and yes, it’s still not coed) produced more Chemistry PhDs than much larger academic institutions. This focus on the sciences remains today - “Among all baccalaureate colleges, Mount Holyoke produces the greatest number of women who go on to earn STEM doctorates. (Source: National Science Foundation, Survey of Earned Doctorates, 1966 – 2015.)” (from the MHC webpage here, which also states that 25% of MHC students major in STEM fields).
At Mount Holyoke, I pursued an interdisciplinary Biochemistry double major. I also developed an interest in Medical Anthropology and designed an interdisciplinary minor in Culture, Health and Science with Dr. Lynn Morgan and Dr. Jim Trostle (who in addition to sharing a love for medical anthropology were also a married couple balancing two careers and two children). Although I had lab-based internships for three summers in various locations (Syracuse, Philly and Atlanta) and did a few different unpaid January internships, I didn’t write my senior thesis on a set of lab experiments like most of my biochem classmates. Instead, I researched the emerging field of psychoneuroimmunology and wrote a thesis focused on the culture of stress at the college with a survey on topics related to stress and illness in college students with help from my advisors, which was the final piece in earning my degree summa cum laude.
I spent two years in a molecular genetics PhD program at Duke on a gene-hunting project where I used bioinformatics resources generated by the Human Genome project. When another group found the gene and my professor changed the direction of my thesis, I decided to end my days in the lab pouring gels and setting up radioactive PCR (polymerase chain reaction) assays. I transferred to the fledgling NCSU bioinformatics program and joined Dr. Bob Kelly’s extremophile genomics lab where I started using SAS and JMP to analyze spotted microarray data for the group. We got early help from a fellow student who worked at SAS (Kevin Scott) as well as JMP’s own Russ Wolfinger-we even visited SAS to meet with him. I also met former JMP LS group superstar (and current manager in the Enterprise Miner group) Dr. Wendy Czika back when Russ’ group was working on SAS genomics product the Scientific Discovery Solutions, the software precurser to JMP Genomics.
What do you enjoy most about your role at JMP?
In my current role as Director of JMP DevOps, I enjoy having many opportunities to learn and grow in new areas. Although I used JMP in grad school and was JMP Genomics product manager from 2006-2012, I found when I moved to the JMP group that I didn’t know “vanilla” JMP or JSL nearly as well as I wanted to. As I began learning the ropes in my new position, I started to try to get more familiar with JMP’s features by working on various data projects with interesting personal data I’d collected over the year and learning some rudimentary scripting skills along the way.
Working with my own data helped me to feel more comfortable reporting bugs and offering feedback on features under development. I continue to love having the chance to hear about (and try) new software updates that JMP dev team members are working on. I collect many such items into a development newsletter that I send out each Friday evening. Like the dev demos meeting series that I recruit for and host 2-4 times a month (currently over Teams), my update item collection has continued virtually via email, and participation is optional. But I do believe the dev update email and dev demos help us introverts keep in better touch, especially this year while we have all been working from home.
Over my years in the main JMP group, as I’ve worked to understand more of our (many) development processes, I often ponder with my teams how we might improve how we create and maintain our software by using our software. The work I did on personal data projects turned out to be applicable to this process – as it turns out, tracking data in exercise, weight or calories over time is not unlike tracking defect flux and performance changes in software. After writing a script to import food log text exported from PDF files and create structured files with regex matching (long before JMP’s PDF Import Wizard made my process obsolete), I started using JMP to pull similar data from build and test logs and parse out important details for troubleshooting purposes.
I have worked with Trish to use data to try to understand hiccups in our translation processes and developed ways to proactively check for process errors with Melanie. Audrey and I have collaborated numerous times over the years to script processes to extract development artifact data from various systems to help us identify and solve issues. More recently, Audrey and I have collaborated to help the dev group leverage two new development tools, coordinating a migration of our wiki knowledge base to Atlassian’s Confluence software with substantial assistance from Amy Stuart. We’re now in the early stages of migrating JMP software issue tracking from Defects to Jira, again with great support from Audrey, Amy, Justin Chilton and many other team members. I’m excited to see these tool changes happen, and I feel they will help support the feature planning process improvements we’ve made in collaboration with the Dan’s product management team over the years.
What do you consider to be your greatest career achievement …or one that just makes you happy or proud?
I am very proud of having had a hand in productionizing JMP’s crash surveillance and reduction efforts over the last several releases. Selfishly, it’s benefitted me as a JMP user to have a more stable daily build to use for my own purposes! But I believe it’s benefitted our customers as well.
After I moved from the life sciences team to the JMP team, I began to notice Jon Weisz comment on his desire that development work to reduce “JMP’s crashiness.” Jon was speaking both as a high-level leader who talks to customers (internal and external) about their quality concerns, but also as an advanced JMP user who solves real business problems with real data. When Jon encounters software crashes, he feels the frustration that our customers around the world do – when JMP abruptly closes, they can lose hours of work.
When I first began considering fixing JMP crashiness it seemed like a challenging problem. We talked about “crashes” like a monolithic thing that could be tackled. It reminds me of how people talk about the set of individual diseases that we call “cancer” and the idea that we can “cure cancer” someday. There are so many different cancer varieties and even more sub-types of each type. Cell and marker studies done in the lab reveal incredible diversity in the form of the tissue types impacted by cell overgrowth, which genetic signatures are displayed, and what treatments work for each subtype. Like a cancer, a crash also has a unique signature that reveals the distinct code path that was executed before the crash, and that signature points to the need for a distinct fix. Signatures can be matched up to identify duplicate issues amenable to the same fix, much like a cancer treatment may work well on one subtype.
I began to explore our crash data after attending a conference where Microsoft team members shared how they had used crash density to map OS areas with a high probability of security vulnerabilities. At the time, we were using crash data to solve customer issues one at a time, but that soon changed as we were deluged by reports of the infamous “green button crash” released with MacOS Mojave. Over the years I have I worked with developers to understand how JMP collects crash data from customers and how to get it out of the places where we store it (Michael Hecht, John Schroedl, Dave Barbour, Chris Swift), tech support team members who wanted to use the data to help give better answers about problems to customers, and various internal teams who I encouraged to start reporting their own crashes through our system . With help from interns (including Isabelle Tamburro, Lisa Grossman, and Austin Hale), we began to document known signatures for existing crashes, structure JMP data tables of crash signatures and automate their creation. Eventually we were able to bring that data into a web-based triage system (many thanks to Myron Chandler). Every hour, automated processes work on crash files from customers around the world and email crash matching results back to TS tracks. We investigate novel issues and provide fix details (if available).
We still get plenty of crash reports every day, but now at least we have an early detection system running during JMP early adopter periods and a system able to screen newly found internal problems to locate matching mystery crashes in our customer crash database.
What do you consider to be your greatest personal achievement …or one that just makes you happy or proud?
I’m proud of sharing my struggles with my massive weight fluctuations over the years prior to my last pregnancy in 2011. Using JMP to look at my own data helped reinforce the importance of data tracking strategies to my own long-term weight maintenance goals. There are a lot of interesting activity tracking devices out there and most of them provide data that you can access using JMP. The personal data projects I did over the years were a springboard to building up my JMP skills and learning approaches I could apply to work-related data sources.
Did you have a mentor who helped you achieve academic or professional success early in your career? Who would you consider your mentor today?
I have been fortunate to have both women and men as mentors during my scientific career. My PhD advisor Dr. Kelly was a mentor to me during grad school at a crucial point. I know some advisors would not have been so understanding when a senior PhD student (14 months from graduation) announced, “I’m pregnant!” His first reaction to my announcement was excitement for me and Brian. Over the months that followed, he shared stories about how when he was a young assistant professor at John Hopkins, he and his wife (a nurse practitioner and longtime nursing faculty member at UNC Chapel Hill) had their three children all within a few short years. He was as supportive as he possibly could have been as I completed my degree and stayed on as a part-time postdoc while Hannah was young.
Dr. Doug Robinson was an important mentor to me in my early days at JMP. Although I’m sure he had moments of frustration with my “fresh from academia” perspectives after his long years in industry positions in tech support and systems engineering, we developed a close partnership as we continued to ship releases every 6-12 months and improve the product. I always appreciated the encouragement and mentorship of Diana Levey and Anne Bullard, who were there to support me at every turn. I owe huge thanks to my three managers here at JMP - Jon Weisz, Anne Milley, and John Sall – for their advice and guidance over the years as they let me chart my own course, make mistakes and learn from them.
Dr. Joseph Morgan has also been a great mentor to me in recent years. He has encouraged me to share some of the data projects I’ve done with JMP development artifacts through joint workshops we have presented together twice at the IEEE ISSRE conference. Joseph may come off as reserved if you don’t know him well, but he is deeply passionate about all topics related to software quality. Joseph has always spoke to me about the importance of finding approaches and tools that work well for our group culture, rather than picking from a one size fits all menu of approaches that might fit the needs of other groups but perhaps might not be right for JMP.
What advice would you give young women interested in pursuing a STEM career?
Don’t restrict yourself to one area within STEM - you may find that your interests lie at the boundaries where disciplines cross. If you have the chance to explore interdisciplinary fields, take it. By not sticking only to one particular silo, you’ll be exposed to new perspectives and approaches that you can carry to other areas of interest.
Follow your interests wherever they lead, even if it’s unexpected. You can develop expertise in any area where you are passionate enough to learn. If you let your interests lead your studies and you are willing to learn along the way, you’ll later find yourself down a path that might have been impossible to see looking ahead, but it makes complete sense looking back.
If you find yourself on a dead end, turn around and find a new path. It was a very painful moment when I admitted to myself that I was so unhappy with my first PhD program that I was going to leave and transfer to another school and program. I hated to “start over”, but I just knew that my heart was not on my original path. I turned around with the full support of my family and never looked back. I have never regretted that decision.
Give something new a try-you just never know. I was hired onto the JMP marketing team by Jon Weisz and John Leary as the JMP Genomics product manager with Russ’ support. At the time I know that they must have hired me for my potential because it was clearly not due to any real skills or experience in the software development field - I literally had no clue what I was getting into and that’s the honest truth!
I came to work at JMP it was because I liked analyzing data using SAS and JMP and using it to understand complex processes. I had experience translating between the languages of lab scientists and programmers. “When she says ABC, she means…and when he says XYZ, he means…” I did not realize how much I had to learn about sales, marketing, and developing products. I definitely floundered in those early days to learn the terminology and to find an approach to guiding development that worked for the life sciences team, but I listened, learned and improved.
Back then, if I had stopped to think deeply about how much I didn’t know before I applied for the JMP Genomics product manager job, perhaps I would have decided I was not qualified enough to apply and might have stuck to more familiar territory. I’m glad I didn’t, because I would have missed out on years of challenge and opportunities here at JMP. I am deeply grateful to be here!
Shannon, her daughter Hannah and husband Brian.Shannon, her daughter Hannah and husband Brian.
Hannah (playing Ursula in the Little Mermaid Jr) with Shannon's son Hunter. They are 7 years apart so it is hard to find too many pics of them together!Hannah (playing Ursula in the Little Mermaid Jr) with Shannon's son Hunter. They are 7 years apart so it is hard to find too many pics of them together!
Brian and Hunter walking the family dogs, Penny (front) and Hulk (back). They are 85 lb mixes who are from the same litter of 12 puppies!Brian and Hunter walking the family dogs, Penny (front) and Hulk (back). They are 85 lb mixes who are from the same litter of 12 puppies!
