Dylan Pieper

Hi, I’m Dylan

About

I’m a data and solutions engineer with a background in social psychology. I build analytical software to solve people’s problems and improve human-centered organizations. My primary role is data engineer at RMI to support people who work on climate goals and the clean energy transition. I build in the open and share what I learn.

Software

redquack

R package that transfers a REDCap project into a database in chunks, so large projects stay queryable instead of hitting memory limits. Works with any database backend.

Built for DuckDB 🦆

surveychat

R package that collects survey data in a chat. The user answers in a natural dialogue while the LLM extracts structured answers, asks adaptive questions, and stores the results in SQL.

Built with shinychat 💬

request
   │
   ▼
change ◄──┐
   │      │ fail
   ▼      │
review ───┘
   │
   ▼
 merge

agentsflow

My workflow for Claude Code agents: shared rules, skills, and tools that take each change from request to review to pull request, with a person at each gate.

Human in the loop 🔁

shinyhanzi

Shiny app for exploring Chinese characters (汉字) with animated stroke order, a breakdown into semantic and phonetic parts, dictionary lookup with pinyin, and English-to-Hanzi search.

Strengthen your character 汉

gemnotes

Shiny app for therapists logging hours toward clinical licensure, giving each therapist a private dashboard behind Google sign-in.

Built for my wife, Julia ❤️

Experience

2026–Present

Data Engineer RMI (Rocky Mountain Institute)

2025–2026

Interim Evaluator, Research Analyst University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health

2021–2025

Data Scientist University of Pittsburgh School of Pharmacy

2020–2021

Research Specialist University of Maryland, Michele Gelfand’s Culture Lab

Education

2018–2020

Social Psychology MA University of Northern Iowa

GPA 3.91

2014–2018

Psychology BA University of Northern Iowa

GPA 3.54

Talks

2025 From messy to meaningful data: LLM-powered classification in R posit::conf

2025 redquack: Memory-efficient REDCap-to-DuckDB workflows R/Medicine

Research

2022 Politicizing mask-wearing: Predicting the success of behavioral interventions among Republicans and Democrats in the U.S. Scientific Reports · with Dimant, Clemente & Azevedo Paper

2021 Persuading conservatives and liberals to comply with mask-wearing: An intervention tournament Journal of Experimental Social Psychology · with Gelfand, Li, Stamkou & 6 others Paper

2021 Cultural tightness–looseness and COVID-19 cases and deaths: A global analysis The Lancet: Planetary Health · with Gelfand, Jackson, Pan & 6 others Paper

2021 COVID-19: Meta-norms to wear masks and social distance in the U.S. Society for Personality and Social Psychology · with Gelfand & Denison Poster

2020 Challenging social systems under the threat of pollution: Replication and extension of Eadeh and Chang (2019) Master's thesis, University of Northern Iowa Thesis

2020 The effect of environmental and violent-crime threats on political orientation and attitudes Midwestern Psychological Association · with Hirano & Harton Poster

2020 Challenging the system under the threat of pollution: Low system justification mediates a liberal political shift Society for Personality and Social Psychology Poster