Keynote Speakers

Beyond Waffle House: Shifting from Transactional Data Providers to Strategic Data Partners

How are data teams seen and treated at your campus? As waiters who provide ad hoc data on demand, or as partners who help shape strategic action? This presentation identifies four common personas which limit data teams’ impact on decision-making, a model of what strategic data partnership looks like, and how to shift the paradigm.

Speaker Biography

Phillip Wallace is a data and analytics leader who thrives at turning numbers into insights that drive strategic action, bridge gaps, and illuminate blind spots. As Director of Development Analytics at Georgia Tech, he enhances the pool of potential donors for Transforming Tomorrow: The Campaign for Georgia Tech, while providing critical insights on progress and performance.

Phillip is also the founder of AltaData Strategy and Insights, LLC, a consultancy dedicated to helping institutions build capacity for data-informed decision-making through strategic alignment, the elevation of data culture, and actionable insight. AltaData reflects his belief that data should empower purpose, not overwhelm it—and that clarity is the foundation of transformation.

Phillip previously served as director of Knowledge Management at UNCF’s Institute for Capacity Building, where he partnered with Historically Black Colleges and Universities in the U.S. to shape data strategy, cultivate communities of data fluency, and strengthen analytics capabilities to support student outcomes and organizational excellence. He has 18 years of experience in higher education data roles across advancement, strategic planning, institutional research, and human resources which enables him to be a strategic partner, aligning data initiatives with organizational priorities and navigating solutions for key challenges and goals.

Data-driven cycling network planning in the GTA

Cycling is a rapidly-growing transportation mode in Canadian cities that is affordable, healthy, and sustainable, but access to destinations on low-stress safe cycling routes remains limited and unevenly distributed. Many cities are expanding their cycling networks, but with finite budgets, where are the most effective places to build new cycling infrastructure? Cycling network planning has traditionally relied on local knowledge and qualitative criteria, but to make a strong case for new infrastructure and effectively evaluate its impact, there is increasing interest in developing quantitative approaches to better prioritize infrastructure. We use data to develop quantitative tools for cycling network design and evaluation, supporting evidence-based decision-making in the GTA and beyond. These data-driven planning approaches have revealed the following findings: (1) the cycling infrastructure projects that most benefit a region are not always the closest projects, a counterintuitive result that challenges commonly-used metrics of infrastructure impact and political conversations around infrastructure, (2) major-street cycling infrastructure at risk of removal in Toronto provides large benefits for accessibility to destinations, and (3) there are tradeoffs between utilitarian and equity-driven optimization strategies for cycling network expansion in Toronto that are determined by the existing spatial arrangement of land use, cycling infrastructure, and marginalized populations. Our work has been incorporated in cycling network planning at the City of Toronto and has contributed to policy discussions in Ontario.

Speaker Biography

Dr. Madeleine Bonsma-Fisher is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto studying how safe cycling networks influence the destinations people can access by bicycle in Canadian cities. She completed her MSc and PhD in biophysics at the University of Toronto and holds a bachelor’s degree in Honours Co-operative Physics from the University of Waterloo. She is a co-founder of UofT Coders, a group for graduate students to teach each other programming skills in a supportive peer environment. She has appeared in CBC News, the Toronto Star, Newstalk 1010, Canada’s National Observer, and several podcasts to discuss cycling infrastructure and advocacy. You can find her on Bluesky at @mbonsma.bsky.social or riding around Toronto with her family on her beloved cargo bikes.