R Programming and Analysis
Summary
I’m an R developer with skills in data analysis and bioinformatics, with a background in academic paleontology.
Major Achievements
• Six peer-reviewed scientific publications, mainly focused on developing and testing statistical approaches related to phylogenetics, including two invited submissions.
• Presented 10 oral presentations given at national and international scientific conferences.
• 8+ years of experience programming in R, particularly with bioinformatics and phylogenetics-related libraries. Creator and maintainer of a publicly-available R package, paleotree (currently with 23 citations in peer-reviewed literature).
Education
Graduate Student, University of Chicago (2007-2013)
- Developed new probability functions, statistical methods and simulation tools for dating phylogenies using the fossil record and released as a documented statistics package.
- Graduate teaching assistant at the University of Chicago for 12 separate courses.
- Helped design and teach life science lab exercises as outreach for minority middle-school students at local middle school.
- Led student workshop on statistical analyses in R including hands-on tutorials.
Undergraduate Research Assistant, State University of New York at Buffalo (2005-2007)
- Developed and managed database of taxonomic and morphometric data for a paleontological assessment of a mass extinction event.
Experience
Postdoctoral Scholar, University of California Davis (2014-Present)
- Developed and publicly released novel statistical methods for integrating fossil and molecular sequence data for inferring evolutionary relationships.
- Applied these new methods to a dataset of shell characteristics and ribosomal DNA for 18 species of modern brachiopods (a group of shelly invertebrate animals).
- Used online collaborative tools to work remotely on team research projects.
Adjunct Assistant Professor, South Dakota School of Mines and Technology (2013-Present)
- Lead principal investigator on two collaborative multi-institutional research funding proposals submitted to the National Science Foundation.
- Co-organized symposium on computational phylogenetics at international conference.
- Guest lecturer for 3 undergraduate courses, including one on Bayesian statistics.
- Participated in a ‘hackathon’ programmer workshop for the Paleobiology Database, devoted to developing new ‘big data’ applications for paleontological data.
Skills
- R
- Markdown
- MrBayes
- BEAST
- Git
- Microsoft Office (Excel, Access, Word)
- Analytical Expertise: Bayesian analyses
- Phylogenetics
- Stochastic simulations
- Multivariate statistics
- Models of birth-death/waiting-time processes
- Incomplete datasets
Spoken Languages
- English