about

a bit more about me, both inside and outside of my job

the profession

I develop and teach data science training curricula and coordinate group Capstone projects for the Master of Environmental Data Science (MEDS) program at the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, located at UC Santa Barbara. I also help lead strategic planning for data science curriculum offerings across the Bren School. In my spare time, I’m a co-organizer of R-Ladies Santa Barbara, a local data science group which works to promote gender diversity in the R community.

My background is in marine ecology and ecophysiology – I had opportunities to study coral disease in Panama and the Florida Keys as an undergrad, then temperature effects on spiny lobster metabolism and foraging behavior in Santa Barbara for my Masters degree. Since the beginning of my time in STEM, I was totally terrified of all things data, coding, and data science (that wasn’t even a widely-used term when I was still in school!), but thanks to a super supportive community and some really rad colleagues and instructors, I found my new path in data science education and I absolutely love it.

A classroom full of students face forward towards the instructor, who stands at a podium at the front of the room. Students have their laptops open on their desks. Three large TV screens are illuminated at the front of the classroom, displaying workshop materials.

Teaching MEDS students how to build their own personal websites using Quarto. This was especially fun for me, since Quarto was still such a new tool when I first gave this workshop – it meant a lot of discovery and learning on-the-fly alongside our students.

While a large part of my role is now program coordination and strategic planning, my passion lies in teaching and working directly with students. I’ve developed a number of workshops and elective courses that supplement the MEDS core curriculum and aim to prepare students with technical and professional skills needed as they move into the workforce (read about our Career & Professional Development Workshop Series, which is one that I’m particularly excited about). I also teach EDS 240: Data Visualization & Communication, which is one of the MEDS core courses. This was my first opportunity to think deeply about and experiment with alternative grading approaches, which you can read more about in this reflective blog post that I wrote after my first year of teaching the class. I am always looking for new ways to make my teaching style and materials more approachable and inclusive for all learners – I try to build my content to be stand-alone resources, both for participants to refer back to and also for those learning on their own time. Feel free to check out / reuse / recycle any of my workshop and course materials.

the hobby

I feel very fortunate to be doing so many of things that I love a lot right now. That includes my job, but also spending lots of time outdoors. Living in Santa Barbara is a massive privilege and being here means that we have access to both the mountains and the sea, each a few minutes in either direction. It was the ocean that brought me here originally, but most of my free time is now spent on the trails.

A smiling woman wearing a green hat crouches down next to a brown dog for a selfie. The dog is looking towards the camera with it's tongue out.

My right-hand hiking gal, Tallie (aka Bean aka TunaB aka SweetCheeks).

I started recording my hikes (and eventually some other activities) on Strava in late 2020 and finally got around to retrieving my activity data using the {rStrava} package. Below is a heatmap of all my recorded activities made using {leaflet}. It’s challenging to see individual markers at my most frequented trailheads / starting points (toggle markers on using the layer controls in the top right corner), so I built my own Strava Dashboard (using {shinydashboard}) to make it a bit more interactive and filterable. It’s a work in progress, but a fun side project that I continue to iterate upon when I’m looking to learn some new skills. Huge shout out to Daniel Cullen for his awesome blog post that got me started with my own map.