University of Mississippi

Ph.D.  Department of Biology 2018 (expected)

Accomplishments

Technical Communication Won second place for communication of doctoral research at university-wide competition (3 Minute-Thesis Competition). Presented research to congressional staffers at university flagship initiative. Taught multiple university-level biology courses and maintained consistently strong evaluations.

Awards Received grants to advance research activities from intramural and extramural sources.

Publications Author and co-author of three peer-reviewed scientific publications with two more currently under review (both as first-author).

Presentations Communicated research at regional and national/international conferences both through posters (4) and spoken presentations (4).

Service and Outreach Activities Reviewer for scientific journals (Wetlands, Microbial Ecology, and PLoS ONE). Co-led environmental microbiology activities at University of Mississippi Field Station Science Day. Judge for Mississippi region 7 Science and Engineering Fair.

Portland State University

B.S.  Department of Environmental Science and Management 2011

Accomplishments

Stream Quality Assessment Analyzed chemical, biological, and EPA rapid bioassessment parameters to quantify the impact of logging on two adjacent watersheds in southern Washington. Con€firmed that sediment and chemical parameters were impacted by logging while there was no statistical difference in the invertebrate assemblages between the two watersheds.

Service and Outreach As coordinator of Portland State University Environmental Club I organized and published a pamphlet on seasonal cooking and expanded electronic waste removal for campus body.

Graduate Researcher University of Mississippi, Oxford, MS 2013 – current

Used open-source bioinformatics software and R to analyze multivariate microbiome datasets. Worked collaboratively as both lead-author and co-author to produce peer-reviewed publications and conference presentations.

• Machine Learning Developed predictive model of bacterial species richness across a year-long interval using random forests. Built a flexible, custom feature engineering function to quantify contribution of individual features across multiple time-scales using any user-specified aggregation function (e.g., sum, mean). Achieved high predictive power for an ecological dataset (R2=0.42).
• Network Analysis Feature Selection Built a feature selection function using a bootstrap-based algorithm to select bacteria significantly interacting in associative networks while limiting false positive error. Generated ecological networks and identified six keystone bacterial species out of more than 30,000 with the igraph package.
• Optimization Optimized existing R code run 77x faster to calculate a probabalistic measure of species sharing in large microbial datasets by leveraging packages for parallelized computation and efficient resampling. Used species sharing models to demonstrate that coexistence of two wetland plant species led to a positive, synergistic effect on bacterial diversity in each species’ roots microbiome.

Lead Field Technician Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 2011

Coordinated students to ensure data collection of multi-year ecophysiology research project over the course of several months. Independently identified new direction for project, secured equipment, and collected data, leading to valuable insights for future research and a presentation at a national scientific conference.

• data manipulation
• data visualization
• general linear modeling
• multivariate statistics
• Monte Carlo and bootstrap methods
• PCA and factor analyses
• network analyses
• survival analyses
• machine learning
• R
• Rmarkdown
• MySQL
• LaTeX
• ArcGIS
• Python
• Jupyter notebooks

Experimental design, Public speaking, scientific writing, Technical Communication