Leslie Welch
Power BI Community Leader | Technical Advisor | Speaker | Mentor
📋 Biography
Leslie Welch is Principal Architect, Data & AI at SHI with over 18 years of experience in automation, data visualization, and strengthening organizations’ knowledge of data. She's worked end-to-end in data, from capture and ETL to database design/engineering to analysis and dashboard design to ML/AI use cases. She has extensive experience in enterprise deployment of Power BI, both as an admin and Power BI architect, and as a trainer and community organizer. She's passionate about data governance, truth-telling in data, and creating collaborative environments between data practitioners and stakeholders. Leslie is co-organizer of Power BI DC and attends and speaks at groups in the DC area, including but not limited to Data Viz DC, Data Science DC, Women Who Code DC, Washington DC Power Platform User Group, and GenAI DC. Leslie was recognized as a 2023 New Power Woman in Tech by DCA Live, and on the RealLIST Engineers 2024 as one of 15 technologists helping the DMV ecosystem grow.
✨ High-Impact Contributions 3
This Monty-Python inspired workshop guided attendees through the mystical (and practical) world of Row-Level Security (RLS), with special attention to the perils and peculiarities of enterprise and government cloud environments. This workshop is designed to provide Power BI developers, ranging from novices to experienced developers, with a solid foundation to implement RLS in Power BI. Workshop attendees learned how to set up RLS start to finish using both dynamic and static approaches, covering setup in both Power BI Desktop the Service. We tackled common challenges, discuss model considerations and how they impact RLS, and untangle the differences between access and security in Power BI. The workshop also addressed governance considerations and some of the unique challenges present within government cloud infrastructures using cross-cloud collaboration.
This session covers my semantic model ideation process, which I developed to address the lack of feedback loops when developing using the classic waterfall approach. I use this process to help clients create performant secure data models aligned to a star schema and Power BI best practices. Attendees walked away with an understanding of what information they need to start this process, how to work through the steps, and how to validate the proposed model will support their visuals. We worked backwards from what data you need to support the user questions, what Power BI needs to support the visuals, and an overview of the approach to building out your medallion architecture technical requirements for Synapse or Azure Databricks.
Power BI DC is the regional Microsoft Power BI and Fabric user group serving the Washington DC metro area. As one of two co-organizers (with Lenore Flower of Data Plumber LLC), I share responsibility for monthly programming, hosting space, speaker recruitment, and member engagement. During FY26 the group held 13 events averaging 72 RSVPs each. Membership grew from 943 at relaunch in 2021 to 2,549 today, with nearly 1,000 new members joining in the past year. A May 2025 event encouraging members to consider speaking led directly to six new speakers debuting at Power BI Days DC the following month. Power BI DC is the only Microsoft-technology-focused user group affiliated with the Data Community DC (DC2) umbrella, providing visibility for Power BI events across DC2's 7 other data groups and ~900 data professionals on the DC2 Slack. I established this bridge in 2024 before joining the DC2 board in January 2025.