DATA SCIENCE - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Summer Undergraduate Intern
Hello, my name is Alan Feria, I am a rising third-year Statistics and Data Science Major at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I am going to be working with Dr. White & Dr. Dikow on a Data Science curriculum as well as a machine learning model to help rebuild and restore the wildlife and biodiversity on the Channel Islands.
Job Titles:
- Summer Undergraduate Intern - 2019
Alejandro was a 2019 undergraduate intern in the Data Science lab. He transferred from East Los Angeles College to UC Davis in Fall 2019. His area of study focuses on an Interdisciplinary combination of Applied Mathematics and Biological Sciences. He worked with the Data Science Lab to utilize a machine learning model to identify the subgenera of bees and create a distribution map of bee diversity by geographical region.
Alex Robillard earned a B.S in Conservation Biology from the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in 2014 and his M.S in Biology from the SUNY College at Oneonta in 2016. A PhD Candidate in Marine, Estuarine and Environmental Science at the University of Maryland focusing on the molecular ecology and conservation of Hawksbill sea turtles in the Eastern Pacific. Alex is a Predoctoral Fellow with the Smithsonian's OCIO Data Science Lab and National Zoo, developing bioinformatic tools pairing genetic data with machine learning for species classification.
Job Titles:
- Summer Undergraduate Intern - 2021
Bella Schrader is an intern at the Smithsonian through the NHRE program. Bella is an undergraduate student at Marshall University in Huntington, WV, studying biomedical engineering. While at the Smithsonian, Bella's research focused on using machine learning tools to organize the images on the NMNH Botany database based on the presence or absence of mercury staining.
Job Titles:
- Biodiversity Genomics Postdoctoral Fellow
- Postdoctoral Fellow
Carlos F. Arias Mejia is a Biodiversity Genomics Postdoctoral Fellow in the Data Science Lab in the Smithsonian Office of the CIO and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama. He has B.S and M.Sc. in Biology from the University of the Andes (Colombia) and a Ph.D. in Biology with focus in Neotropical Environment from McGill University (Canada). His research focuses on the evolutionary processes and mechanisms driving and constraining the origin of new species in nature. He is particularly interested on how historical and contemporary processes interact to create and maintain novel variation. Carlos will be using population genomics and bioinformatic approaches to characterize patterns of genome-wide divergence at both local and regional spatial scales within neotropical taxa.
Job Titles:
- Summer Undergraduate Intern
Cristina is an 2022 summer intern in the Data Science Lab. Cristina is a student at the University of California, Davis studying Genetics and Genomics. They are working with Dr. Jennifer Spillane to examine genome contamination using computational tools.
Job Titles:
- Summer Undergraduate Intern - 2021
Dalila Lara is a Summer Intern in the Smithsonian Institution OCIO Data Science lab. She is an Undergraduate at the University of California Santa Barbara pursuing her B.A. in Biological Anthropology and Global Studies. Currently she is working on a project that studies the genomics and evolution of the genus Syntrichia.
Alex White's areas of scholarly expertise include statistical modeling in biogeography, quantitative ecology, ornithology, and community phylogenetics. Dr. White's research focuses on how ecological and evolutionary forces (e.g., dispersal, range expansion, competition, and speciation) interact to mediate broad scale patterns of biodiversity and how those interactions are influenced by local ecological dynamics. Most of this research focuses on birds, though he compares avian patterns with those of other taxonomic groups including plants, mammals, and invertebrates. This work combines traditional methods in ecology and evolution with modern advances in statistics and computation, particularly those in machine learning and data science. As a Biodiversity Research Data Scientist in the Smithsonian Data Science Lab, he leads projects that leverage digitized museum collections as well as applications of computer hardware technology in edge uses of machine learning for field studies of animal and plant ecology. He is an Associate Editor for Ornithology.
Alex received his Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago, where he developed these and other questions to study the evolution and ecology of Himalayan birds.
Job Titles:
- Biodiversity Genomics Postdoctoral Fellow
- Postdoctoral Fellow
Jenna Ekwealor is a Biodiversity Genomics Postdoctoral Fellow in the Data Science Lab. She earned a B.S. in Biology from Purdue University, a B.A. in Religious Studies from Indiana University, a M.S. in Environmental Science from California State University, Los Angeles, and a Ph.D. in Integrative Biology from University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on plant adaptations to extreme environments, using dryland mosses in the genus Syntrichia as a model system for adaptive abiotic stress tolerance. These small plants have found a way to only truly "live" when enough water is present and dry out and go quiescent when water is absent. For desert mosses that may be most of the time! Yet, Syntrichia species are able to quickly begin to grow and thrive again, while recovering from damage that accumulated while they were desiccated. In the Data Science Lab, Jenna will explore the evolutionary history of the genomic underpinnings of tolerance of UV and desiccation in Syntrichia and in land plants in a phylogenetic context. She also looks forward to beginning new, integrative projects in the realms of plant evolutionary eco-physiology or life history using phylogenomic, metabolomic, or other bioinformatic techniques.
Jennifer Spillane (she/her) is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Smithsonian Institution Data Science Lab. She earned a B.A. in Biology from Trinity Christian College and an M.Sc. in Biology from Western Washington University. Spillane recently finished her Ph.D. in Molecular and Evolutionary Systems Biology at the University of New Hampshire where she used phylogenomics and comparative genomics to learn more about trait evolution in animals, and particularly marine invertebrates. As part of the Data Science Lab, she will work on developing machine learning models to address the problem of DNA sequence contamination. She is generally interested in improving genomic and bioinformatic methods to better study non-model and under-represented organisms.
Mirian Tsuchiya was the Smithsonian Women's Committee Data Science Postdoctoral Fellow. She has a B.S. in Biology from the Universidade Estadual de Londrina, an M.Sc. in Zoology from the Pontificia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul and a Ph.D. in Environmental Science and Policy from the George Mason University. Her dissertation research focused on using whole genome sequencing, targeted enrichment of ultraconserved elements (UCEs) and mitogenomes under a phylogenomics framework to assess questions regarding the biogeography, taxonomy, and evolutionary history of Neotropical mammals. Mirian worked on a variety of biodiversity genomics projects with the Data Science Lab and now an ORISE fellow at the Food and Drug Administration Center for Applied Food Safety.
Job Titles:
- Research Associate
- Assistant Professor of Plant
Paul Frandsen is an Assistant Professor of Plant and Wildlife Sciences at Brigham Young University. He helped co-found the Data Science Lab and remains a close collaborator. Paul earned his PhD from Rutgers University in the Department of Entomology where he worked on the phylogenetics of caddisflies and on developing algorithms for the automatic selection of models of molecular evolution. Paul's website
Job Titles:
- Data Scientist
- Research Data Scientist
Rebecca Dikow is a Research Data Scientist and leads the Smithsonian Institution Data Science Lab. She has a B.S. in Biology from Cornell University and a Ph.D. in Evolutionary Biology from the University of Chicago. Her dissertation research focused on using whole-genome data to build evolutionary trees (phylogenies). After the completion of her Ph.D., she was the Biodiversity Genomics postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian. She is working with Smithsonian scientists to conduct biodiversity research, including genomics, informatics, and machine learning. She is also an affiliated faculty member in the George Mason University School of Systems Biology.
Job Titles:
- Biodiversity Genomics Postdoctoral Fellow
- Postdoctoral Fellow
Richie Hodel is a Biodiversity Genomics Postdoctoral Fellow in the Smithsonian Data Science Lab and the Department of Botany at the National Museum of Natural History. He has a B.A. in Music Theory from Amherst College, a M.S. in Biology from Appalachian State University, and a Ph.D. in Botany from the University of Florida. His work in the Data Science Lab is focused on developing methods that use machine learning to generate high throughput phenotypic data from digitized herbarium specimen images, with species in the cherry genus (Prunus) used as test cases. Ultimately, the goal is to combine multidimensional phenotypic trait data with genomic and environmental data from the same specimens to improve our understanding of the genome-phenome-environment connection and how it shapes biodiversity.
Job Titles:
- Summer Undergraduate Intern
I am interested in Bioinformatics and data analysis approaches to understand the distribution and how environmental factors as physical barriers enhance speciation in tropics.
Job Titles:
- Summer Undergraduate Intern
Kayla Geronimo-Anctil is studying Environmental Science at California State University Channel Islands after having transferred from Ventura College in 2021. This summer, she is mainly working with Dr. Jenna Ekwealor on the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History collections records project. This project aims to uncover people that have been deprived of due credit for their collections work, and increases awareness of the diversity and perspectives that they contributed to in their respective fields.
Job Titles:
- Summer Undergraduate Intern - 2021
Luis is a 2021 undergraduate intern in the OCIO Data Science lab. He transferred from Santa Barbara City College to California State University Channel Islands in Fall 2018. He graduated in Winter 2020 with a Bachelors of Computer Science. He is working with the Data Science lab utilizing machine learning tools in text classification to categorize Holocaust documents in collaboration with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM).
Job Titles:
- Summer Undergraduate Intern
Madeline Bursell was an intern in the Data Science Lab in 2019 and recently graduated from Brigham Young University. While there, she earned an undergraduate degree in Genetics, Genomics, and Biotechnology. Madeline Bursell is working again with Rebecca Dikow and other members of the Data Science Lab in multiple genome projects as well as testing out genomics workflows in Cyverse, the NSF funded computing platform. Madeline is very excited to be back in the Data Science lab and working towards a PhD and a career in conservation genomics.
Matt Bollinger is an alumnus of the University of Virginia with a background in Classics and Finance. Matt is interested in neural networks and deep learning, especially as it applies to image recognition and natural language. In his free time, Matt enjoys reading, playing music, and participating in trivia competitions.
Job Titles:
- Summer Undergraduate Intern - 2021
Sammy is an REU intern at the University of Maryland MEES program and working on a machine learning project in collaboration with the Data Science Lab. When he's not stuck in the lab trying to remember the chemical formula for olivine, he enjoys spending his free time going on hikes around Pennsylvania or convincing his friends to go scuba diving. Besides getting lost in the woods during a hiking trip, he is also a self-proclaimed movie nerd. Once he finishes his undergraduate degree at Dickinson College, he plans to attend graduate school for soil science or coastal disaster management with the end goal of becoming a university professor.
Job Titles:
- Summer Undergraduate Intern - 2019
Sarah Agarrat is an undergraduate student at the University of Maryland-College Park studying Computer Science and Mathematics. While working at the UMD Digital Curation Innovation Center, she became interested in the applications of data science to digitized collections. At the Smithsonian, she worked to develop visualizations of NMNH data and utilizing machine learning techniques such as deep learning to estimate geolocations.
Job Titles:
- Summer Undergraduate Intern - 2019
Seth Wilson was an intern in the Data Science Lab and an undergraduate student from Brigham Young University. He is studying Genetics, Genomics, and Biotechnology. As a data science intern, Seth was interested in using data to better understand biological patterns in nature. Seth worked on developing pix plot analyses from different data sets provided from different branches of the Smithsonian to help visualize the image classification done by neural networks.
Job Titles:
- Summer Undergraduate Intern - 2019
Tiana was a summer intern in the Data Science lab, and undergraduate student at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She graduated with a degree in Mathematics in spring 2020. Tiana worked with the Data Science Lab on a project relating to the Smithsonian American Women's History Initiative, focusing on women researchers at the Smithsonian Institution. Her work included data processing, data analysis, and data visualization to show the history of women researchers at the Smithsonian Institution.