Neuroscience, Education, and Data Science
My current research interests lie at the nexus of neuroimaging and data science. I focus on developing statistical techniques and software for the analysis of diffusion MRI (dMRI) data, which is situated within the paradigm of Automated Fiber Quantification (AFQ). See autofq.org for further documentation of our projects. I also develop browser based tools for the deep phenotyping of dyslexia. I am supervised by Jason Yeatman, and collaborate with Ariel Rokem and Noah Simon, among many others.
Physics
Before transitioning to neuroscience, I pursued physics, earning my PhD under the supervision of Aurel Bulgac at the University of Washington. My research focused on sign-problem avoidance techniques in auxiliary field quantum Monte Carlo simulations, with applications to the BCS-BEC crossover and infinite neutron matter. I was fortunate to collaborate with Joaquín Drut, Jeremy Holt, Kenneth Roche, and Gabriel Wlazłowski.
Before that, I earned my MS in physics under the supervision of Andreas Bill at California State University, Long Beach. My research there focused on modeling the coexistence of superconductivity and magnetism in heterogeneous structures composed of superconducting and ferromagnetic layers.
I was a visiting researcher for about six months at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Under the supervision of John Armstrong, we demonstrated a new radio science application for spacecraft navigation signals.
Computing
Computational science is the theme uniting my work in both physics and neuroscience. Here are some of my research computing activities not captured in the domain-specific sections above:
The Carpentries
I volunteer as an instructor with The Carpentries (which comprises Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry). I help teach shell scripting, introductory python, and principles of version control in 2-4 day workshops hosted by the eScience Institute at the University of Washington.
If you’d like to learn basic lab skills for research computing, you should definitely attend one of the upcoming carpentries workshops or contact me if you’d like help in requesting a workshop at your institution.
Cloudknot
With Ariel Rokem, we developed a python library called Cloudknot (documentation, source code) that helps researchers run eir existing code on AWS Batch.
UW Research Computing Club
As my PhD research became more and more computationally intensive, I helped start the UW Research Computing Club. I served as a founding officer and the president of the club, which facilitates access to and training for UW’s shared supercomputing cluster, Hyak. The club manages over one million dollars in computing resources, both on Hyak and in the cloud. It provides access to these resources and training to students to use them effectively and responsibly. To my knowledge, it is the only student-run club in the nation that provides access to supercomputing resources to all undergraduate and graduate students on its campus, regardless of lab affiliation. After serving as president of the club, I then served on the Hyak Governance Board, which advises the leadership of UW on how best to meet the high performance computing needs of UW researchers.