John Apel Jr.

John Apel Jr. — Data Science Portfolio

Predictive modeling · Deep learning · ETL & data engineering · SQL database design · Process improvement

Healthcare Access Analytics (NC Pediatric Specialists)

NPPES · Census ACS · GeoPandas · Folium · GIS

Built a reproducible geospatial pipeline mapping pediatric specialist supply vs. child population across North Carolina's 100 counties. Identified 67% of counties as severe access deserts and 8 counties with zero pediatric specialists.

Healthcare Access Analytics (NC Prenatal Care)

HRSA AHRF · Census ACS · HPSA · CDC WONDER · GeoPandas · Statsmodels

Five-source geospatial analysis of prenatal care access across NC's 100 counties; identified 27 counties with zero OB/GYN providers, 96/100 counties with active maternity shortage designations, and a federal surveillance gap that renders all 23 Western NC counties invisible in CDC natality data.

Process Improvement (DMAIC)

MBC-638 · Statistics · Six Sigma

Personal fitness optimization using Six Sigma DMAIC, regression, and hypothesis testing; +200 cal/day improvement validated via two-sample t-test.

Membership Database (SQL Server)

IST-659 · ER/3NF · Triggers · Governance

Normalized 3NF schema (8 entities) with T-SQL triggers and views for LARC (150+ members); migrated from Access → SQL Server for scalability and integrity.

Geospatial Analytics (Chronic Disease)

CDC PLACES · Census ACS · GeoPandas · Folium

ETL pipeline integrating 2 federal data sources across 2,956 counties; identified 326 "triple burden" counties where diabetes, uninsured rates, and poverty converge.

Machine Learning (Preventive Pulse)

CDC BRFSS · scikit-learn · SMOTE · XGBoost · Matplotlib

Heart-disease prediction on 319K+ CDC survey records; logistic regression with SMOTE achieved 83.5% ROC-AUC and 75.7% F1-score across 6 classifiers. Identified age, stroke history, and self-reported health as the dominant risk factors. Applied the trained pipeline to 445K unseen 2022 records.

Deep Learning (Melanoma Detection)

HAM10000 · TensorFlow/Keras · EfficientNet-B0 · Grad-CAM · Transfer Learning

Image classifier detecting melanoma from 10,015 dermoscopy images using two-stage transfer learning with EfficientNet-B0. Achieved Macro ROC-AUC of 0.925 across 7 lesion types. Grad-CAM heatmaps visualize model focus regions for clinical interpretability.