Nice to meet you! 👋🏼

My name is Lucas Adelino, a data engineer and computational linguist.

What I’m up to now

I’m a data engineer at NGI, which oversees business intelligence initiatives within the public health department of the City of Recife.

At NGI, I build and maintain data pipelines. This typically involves working with stakeholders and data analysts to understand business needs, identifying and extracting data from various sources, building transformations with dbt, and orchestrating everything with Airflow. My other responsibilities include maintaining NGI’s databases and an internal datahub–a website we use to document and share data with other teams at the City of Recife.

I was fortunate to join NGI shortly after its inception. Our teammates and I built our data infrastructure from the ground up, from choosing the tools for our data stack to installing and configuring them. This was an incredible opportunity, as it gave me a much deeper command of foundational data engineering tools than I might have gained otherwise.

What I did before

I studied Computational Linguistics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, graduating with a master’s degree in 2024. My research was on automatic paraphrase type annotation–check out this blog post for a brief overview. I was also a graduate teaching assistant for the Data Literacy Lab, a course on the basics of data analysis, including exploratory analysis in Excel, data visualization in Tableau, and statistical analysis in RStudio. I also dabbled in researching the wonderful oddities of Brazilian Portuguese.

UNC was somewhat of a sea change for me: before, I studied education at Auburn University, graduating with a master’s degree in 2022. During my time at Auburn, I was also a program assistant at the University Writing initiative, where I helped students build professional websites and taught workshops on English academic writing.