Graduate Student and Postdoctoral Affiliates
Active Graduate Students
Liam Bahjan
PhD Student, Geography
Research Focus: Application of remote sensing and spatial analyses in smallholder agriculture to help improve in farm management techniques and climate change adaptation
Liam is a member of the #maptimeDavis Council in the Spatial Sciences community of practice.
Colton Baumler
PhD Student, Biochemistry, Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology
Research Focus: Addressing biomedical questions by applying bioinformatics to public data in the population health field; bioinformatic software development
Colton developed and presented a series of workshops at DataLab on leveraging open source software for literature reviews and bibliometrics. Colton is a contributing member of the Bioinformatics community of practice, and TA’d for DataLab’s Adventures in Data Science (STS 115 and 195) courses.
John P. (JP) Calcitrai
PhD Candidate, Animal Behavior (designated emphasis in Computational Social Science)
Research Focus: Evolutionary dynamics of coalition formation, evolutionary game theory, agent-based modeling, and techniques for developing empirically informed simulations of complex social systems (e.g., digital twins).
JP is a graduate student lead for the Python Users Group.
Jenny Cribbs
PhD Student,
Research Focus:
Jenny is the graduate student lead for the Davis R Users’ Group.
Femi Falade
PhD Student, Animal Biology, Alison Van Eenanemm’s Lab
Research Focus: Computational animal genetics and breeding
Nicole Dodd
PhD Student, Linguistics
Research Focus: Arabic, computational psycholinguistics, human language processing of natural and programming languages, human-computer interaction with voice-AI, and low-resource or under-represented language
Pablo M. Flores
PhD Student, Communication
Research Focus: Collective emotions, behavioral dynamics, and social communication in online environments
Lupe Franco
PhD Student, Geography
Research Focus: Environmental justice, climate justice, CBPR, climate adaptation and resiliency, housing
Lupe is a member of the #maptimeDavis Council in the Spatial Sciences community of practice.
Adam Getchell
PhD Student, Physics
Research Focus: Quantum gravity using computational models
Adam is a DataLab liaison to campus HPC, specifically the Farm compute cluster.
Ashley Grupenhoff
PhD Student, Ecology, Safford Lab
Research Focus: Examining the consequences of altered disturbance regimes on specific composition and ecosystem function with particular interest in the effects of prescribed fire in shaping plant species, populations, and communities
Shenwen Gu
PhD Student, Molecular, Cellular and Integrative Physiology, Zhou Lab
Research Focus: Biotechnology with a focus on identifying causal variants for growth-related complex traits in chickens and elucidating the underlying mechanisms
Sarah Heuckeroth
PhD Student, Psychology
Research Focus: Personality psychology
Veronica Herrera
Masters Student, Geography
Research Focus: Effects of long-term public policy and urban planning in today’s cities, with a particular focus on how different levels of public infrastructure investment historically create unequal patterns of neighborhood-scale economic productivity
Veronica is a member of the #maptimeDavis Council in the Spatial Sciences community of practice.
Lisa Johnson
PhD Student, Psychology
Research Focus: Developmental psychology, with interest in positive youth development within the context of early adversity, especially the interaction of environmental and physiological mechanisms underlying trajectories of adolescent adaptive functioning (e.g., self-regulation, coping, peer competence)
Arthur Koehl
Master’s Student, Hydrology
Research Focus: Methods for the computational analysis of high resolution topographic maps with goals to develop a classification of valley types based on shape, geology, and climate.
Arthur is a former DataLab data scientist and GSR.
Richard Kornrumpf
PhD Student, Political Science
Research Focus: Intergroup behavior, social identity, and affective polarization
Michael Livanos
PhD Student, Computer Science
Research Focus: Fairness and explanation in machine learning, including developing new algorithms and approaches for understanding how and why black box machine learning models make the decisions they do, and how to best use them for performance and equity
Michael contributed to the development of DataLab’s Responsible Data Science workshop and reader.
Lauren Mabe
PhD Student, Geography
Research Focus: Food waste, discard studies, political economy, industrial ecology, and GIS
Lauren is a member of the #maptimeDavis Council in the Spatial Sciences community of practice.
Connor Mitchell
PhD Student, Sociology
Cassandra Olivas
PhD Student, Integrative Genetics and Genomics
Research Focus: Applied computational approaches to analyzing metagenomic samples, and bioinformatic software development.
Cassandra is a graduate student lead for the Python Users Group..
Anahita Pochiraju
Master’s Student, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Aryana Razmara
PhD Student, Immunology
Research Focus: Small animal medicine and comparative oncology research
Nathalie Redick
Master’s Student, Geophysics
Research Focus: Understanding seismic anisotropy observations in the context of 3D slab-induced flow in the Cascadia Subduction Zone
Nathalie is a GSR at DataLab working on open source software development. Nathalie also helps maintain and onboard users to Vrui, DataLab’s virtual reality software platform for research and collaboration, in the Earth and Planetary Sciences KeckCAVE.
Dino Sbardellati
PhD Student, Microbiology, Vanette Lab
Research Focus: Understanding how microbial ecology shapes macroscale ecology, inparticular studying the bacteriophage (viruses that target bacteria) communities associated with the bumblebee gut and how phages shape gut microbial communities
Saisha Shetty
Master’s Student, Computer Science
Research Focus: integration of gamification into artificial intelligence (AI) education
Saisha was a GSR at DataLab under the guidance of Professor Vladimir Filkov (Computer Science) and Professor Roger Goldman (Radiology) to develop an LLM-powered tool to annotate radiology clinical reports, focusing on capturing relationships between entities to improve clinical data accuracy.
Cory Schlesener
PhD Student, Microbiology, Weimer Lab
Research Focus: Utilizing population genomics to explore diversity of microorganisms and their interactions with hosts, with a particular focus on evolution and population dynamics of pathogens and their traits
Priyal Soni
Master’s Student, Computer Science
Priyal was a GSR at DataLab focusing on open source software sustainability.
S. Hayley Steele
PhD Student, Cultural Studies
Research Focus: Broad range of interests from environmental humanities to analog game and critical code studies
Marcos Martínez Sugastti
PhD Student, Agricultural and Resource Economics, Markets, Risk, and Resilience (MRR) Innovation Lab.
Research Focus: Social protection programs in Latin America and East Africa
Andrea Yang
PhD Student, English
Research Interests: Early modern literature at the intersections of gender, race, and science
Andrea completed a research internship at DataLab focusing on data rescue for the British Women Romantic Poets project.
Postdoctoral Scholars
Ramon Botigelli
Postdoctoral Scholar, Animal Science
Research Focus: Mammalian embryo development, embryonic cell fate, and adult cell reprogramming into iPSCs
Sophie Preckler-Quisquater
Postdoctoral Scholar, Veterinary Genetics Lab, Dennis Lab
Research Focus: Incorporating traditional ecological field methods with genomic tools to investigate how both natural and anthropogenic drivers influence evolutionary processes including speciation, hybridization, adaptation, and shifting range dynamics
Daniela Soto
Postdoctoral Scholar, Genome Center
Research Focus: Bioinformatics, data science, omics integration, and women in STEM
Xiaoguang Zhu
Postdoctoral Scholar, DataLab
Research Focus: Health data science
Xiaoguang is a TRANSCEND postdoctoral scholar at DataLab.
Recent Affiliate Alumni
Maggie Berrens
PhD, Chemistry
Research Focus: Computational physical chemistry and atmospheric chemistry in the Donadio Lab
Maggie was a graduate student lead for the Python Users Group.
Viki Haghani
PhD, Integrative Genetics and Genomics
Research Focus: Neurodevelopmental genetics and bioinformatics, with a focus on the genetic mechanisms underlying Rett Syndrome
Viki was a graduate student lead for the Python Users Group.
Tara Pozzi
PhD, Ecology, Environmental Science and Policy
Research Focus: Behavior and decision-making processes that influence a community’s adaptive capacity and resilience to hazards
Tara was the graduate student lead for the Davis R Users Group.
Sydney Wood
PhD, Quantitative Psychology (emphasis in Computational Social Science)
Research Focus: The impact of incentive structures in science on the cultural evolution of social science research practices, with work towards enhancing research methodology education to improve the efficacy of scientific practices in academia.
Sydney co-developed the Responsible Data Science curriculum at DataLab.