Biography

My formal education was a winding road revolving around my broad interests in behavioral ecology and wildlife conservation. Along the way, I nurtured an interest in the quantitative side of research. My statistics coursework introduced me to SAS but a course on using MATLAB as a research tool became a gateway to R, which has been my primary computational tool for over 10 years. My work in R primarily centers on cleaning, analyzing, and visualizing data, but I’ve also used R for building simulation models and I particularly enjoy building GUI applications with Shiny. My second favorite computational tool is NetLogo, which I’ve used for building spatially-explicit, individual-based models of foraging behavior and animal movement. The latest evolution of my professional pursuits involves an expanding interest in programming and scientific computing.