Looking to move out of nonprofit/govt space -> DS/analytics - referrals?

Hello everyone, New here, but like some folks, I'm looking to make a slight switcheroo and land a DS job that would hopefully significantly bump pay and help me master a few new skills. I currently work at a nonprofit and have been doing quant research for last 5 years. Before that, I had a whole other academic research career that in biology. Now hoping to get into either health tech, DS for good agencies that pay decent, news media (NYTimes, LA Times, etc.), or something in a creative space (music or design software). My background is squarely in what one might call "analytics" or "research," not necessarily in things like machine learning, but I have some familiarity with ML from my graduate education. I'd love a referral to get my foot into the door! Or any advice for how to start making connections and getting interviews. Happy to chat more via DM. My gist: - PhD in biomedical research - Pivoted to policy analysis -- got masters in policy admin and spent last 5 years doing social science research for gov't/non-profit spaces - Became fluent in R, learned some beginner SQL and am learning Python (also decent at HTML and CSS, learning JavaScript). - Research methods I've used for projects I've led include data modeling (clustering/classification techniques), lots of descriptive stats and data viz, and some geospatial mapping. Lots of data communication, stakeholder engagement, project management, collabs with other technical (e.g., web devs, other researchers) and non-technical (communications staff, advocacy teams) folks regularly, etc. current base: 99k #spotify #healthtech #health #flatironhealth #atlassian #faang #google #microsoft #apple #figma #adobe #webflow #nytimes #losangelestimes #washingtonpost