Graduate Student and Postdoctoral Affiliates

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. Colton is a contributing member of the Bioinformatics community of practice.

Maggie Berrens

PhD Student, Chemistry

Research Focus: Computational physical chemistry and atmospheric chemistry in the Donadio Lab

Maggie is a graduate student lead for the Python 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

Viki Haghani

PhD Student, Integrative Genetics and Genomics

Research Focus: Neurodevelopmental genetics and bioinformatics, with a focus on the genetic mechanisms underlying Rett Syndrome

Viki is a graduate student lead for the Python Users Group.

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

Anahita Pochiraju

Master’s Student, Electrical and Computer Engineering

Tara Pozzi

PhD Student, Ecology, Environmental Science and Policy

Research Focus: Behavior and decision-making processes that influence a community’s adaptive capacity and resilience to hazards

Tara is the graduate student lead for the Davis R Users Group.

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 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 is a GSR at DataLab working 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 is 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

Sydney Wood

PhD Student, 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

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.

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

Michelle Viscaino

Postdoctoral Scholar, DataLab

Research Focus: Health data science

Michelle is a TRANSCEND postdoctoral scholar at DataLab.

Xiaoguang Zhu

Postdoctoral Scholar, DataLab

Research Focus: Health data science

Xiaoguang is a TRANSCEND postdoctoral scholar at DataLab.