R Programming and Analysis

Resume posted by dwbapst in Scientific.

Desired position type: Any
Location: Rapid City South Dakota, United States

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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