My Toolbox
I like to think of myself as a bit of a Swiss Army knife: versatile, effective, and replete with obscure tools you didn’t even realize you needed until you really really did! However, unlike the tried-and-true Swiss Army knife, I am constantly looking for new tools to add to my kit and improving on the ones I have.
Click on the tabs below to learn about some of the skills I have picked up along the way and tools I use to get the job done!
Good science is no good to anyone if you can’t effectively communicate it! I pride myself in being a succinct, effective, and engaging writer and speaker. With the Nature Conservancy of Canada, I have harnessed that skill to showcase the amazing conservation work we are performing in Alberta and the rest of Canada.
Using R and the ggplot2 package is typically my first step towards making informative and aesthetically pleasing figures for manuscripts, lectures, or posters. Beyond published manuscripts and conference presentations, I particularly enjoy the opportunities I get to present conservation themed material to general audiences. For a short(er) example clip of my speaking and Powerpoint style, click here.
The not-so-glamorous side of any good science project that is vital to its success, I’m proficient at making sure there’s money to pay for the work, the equipment and personnel to get the job done, and the required permissions from all relevant parties to do so! Having been in both the public and private spheres during my science career, I am well-versed in the trials and tribulations of bureaucratic processes and the need for near-constant vigilance to deadlines and project requirements, including:
- Financial management
- Equipment purchasing, inventory, and maintenance
- Grants, permitting, ethics approvals
- Personnel logistics
- Tracking deliverables
- Communication progress with stakeholders
I spend a lot of my time cleaning and managing datasets that arrive with all kinds of chaos embedded in them, and I am a huge fan of the Tidy Data framework and associated Tidyverse packages for R to do so. I am a firm believer in the importance of relational databases (vs, say, that excel file that changes random bits of your data to dates without you realizing), and the need for transparent, well documented, and reproducible data practices.
Primates are long lived and slow reproducing, so our sample sizes are preeeeetty small on a good day, and full of thorny analyses challenges like excess zeroes and repeated measures. Because of the nature of our data, primatologists tend to be early adopters of new statistical methods, and if the solution doesn’t exist I’ve even been known to invent one! For a recent paper, not finding a satisfactory “out of the box” program for simulating our capuchin study population’s growth through time, I wrote my own. Some of the other statistical methods recently employed include:
- Bayesian analysis
- Generalized linear mixed modelling
- Sliding window analysis
- Population viability assessment
- Circular statistics
- Multinomial/categorical modelling
- Survival analysis
The best part about the work I have done most of my adult life is spending lots of time in stunning and wild places, collecting the data needed to produce high-quality scientific projects. Along the way, I’ve worked in some pretty extreme places, from -40°C days in Northern BC four hours up ice roads, to +40°C days in the tropical dry forests of Costa Rica following monkeys through dry creek beds from dawn to dusk. Some of the techniques I’ve used include:
- Wildlife tracking and monitoring
- Soil, water and vapour sampling
- Plant identification and phenology
- Spatial data
- Wilderness first aid
- Class 5 license, pleasure craft operator’s license, ATV training, even my first hour of pilot training!*
*do not hire me to fly a plane… we’re both better off avoiding that
Following a few university courses, and a 6 month backpacking trip through South America, it was finally a 1-year stint living in Costa Rica that gave me the exposure and practice needed to feel comfortable reading, writing and conversing in Spanish. The computer languages have come from a mix of work experience and continuing education courses, and a whole lot of trial and error.
- English
- Spanish
- R
- MySQL/SQL Server
- C#
- HTML5/CSS/Javascript
- VBA
The not-so-glamorous side of any good science project that is vital to its success, I’m proficient at making sure there’s money to pay for the research, the equipment and personnel to get the job done, and the required permissions from all relevant parties to do so! Having been in both the public and private spheres during my science career, I am well-versed in the trials and tribulations of bureaucratic processes and the need for near-constant vigilance to deadlines and project requirements, including:
- Financial management
- Equipment purchasing, inventory, and maintenance
- Grants, permitting, ethics approvals
- Personnel logistics
The best part about the work I have done most of my adult life is spending lots of time in stunning and wild places, collecting the data needed to produce high-quality scientific projects. Along the way, I’ve worked in some pretty extreme places, from -40°C days in Northern BC four hours up ice roads, to +40°C days in the tropical dry forests of Costa Rica following monkeys through dry creek beds from dawn to dusk. Some of the techniques I’ve used include:
- Wildlife tracking and monitoring
- Soil, water and vapour sampling
- Plant identification and phenology
- Spatial data
- Wilderness first aid
- Class 5 license, pleasure craft operator’s license, ATV training, even my first hour of pilot training!*
*do not hire me to fly a plane… we’re both better off avoiding that
I spend a lot of my time cleaning and managing datasets that arrive with all kinds of chaos embedded in them, and I am a huge fan of the Tidy Data framework and associated Tidyverse packages for R to do so. I am a firm believer in the importance of relational databases (vs, say, that excel file that changes random bits of your data to dates without you realizing), and the need for transparent, well documented, and reproducible data practices.
Primates are long lived and slow reproducing, so our sample sizes are preeeeetty small on a good day, and full of thorny analyses challenges like excess zeroes and repeated measures. Because of the nature of our data, primatologists tend to be early adopters of new statistical methods, and if the solution doesn’t exist I’ve even been known to invent one! For a recent paper, not finding a satisfactory “out of the box” program for simulating our capuchin study population’s growth through time, I wrote my own! Some of the other statistical methods recently employed include:
- Bayesian analysis
- Generalized linear mixed modelling
- Sliding window analysis
- Population viability assessment
- Circular statistics
- Multinomial/categorical modelling
- Survival analysis
Good science is no good to anyone if you can’t effectively communicate it! I pride myself in being a succinct, effective, and engaging writer and speaker. Using R and the ggplot2 package is typically my first step towards making informative and aesthetically pleasing figures for manuscripts, lectures, or posters. Beyond published manuscripts and conference presentations, I particularly enjoy the opportunities I get every semester to serve as a guest lecturer for many of our department’s undergrad courses, often presenting conservation themed material. For a short(er) example clip of my speaking and Powerpoint style, click here.
Following a few university courses, and a 6 month backpacking trip through South America, it was finally a 1-year stint living in Costa Rica that gave me the exposure and practice needed to feel comfortable reading, writing and conversing in Spanish. The computer languages have come from a mix of work experience and continuing education courses, and a whole lot of trial and error.
- English
- Spanish
- R
- MySQL/SQL Server
- C#
- HTML5/CSS/Javascript
- VBA
