Our Team
To get in touch with a team member, please fill out our contact form or email us at datalab@ucdavis.edu.
Directors
Carl Stahmer, Director
Carl Stahmer is a digital humanist, leveraging his expertise as a computer programmer and system architect to tackle complex problems in the humanities and beyond. He received his PhD in English from UC Santa Barbara. He is a professor in English and Science and Technology Studies at UC Davis, and teaching faculty at the Rare Book School. Prior to UC Davis he helped establish the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities. His interests include natural language processing, computer vision, and library science.
Pamela Reynolds, Associate Director
Pamela Reynolds has a background in interdisciplinary research and team science. She manages DataLab’s research projects, education programs, and data science community efforts. She teaches computational tools and thinking to enable innovation and student success. Pamela received her PhD in Biology from UNC Chapel Hill, and bachelor’s in Biological Sciences and English from UC Davis. She led a global research network for her postdoc. Her interests include experimental design, statistical modeling, and data science pedagogy.
Scott Armanini, Associate Director of Strategic Initiatives
Scott Armanini is responsible for civic and corporate engagement, and creating partnerships with government agencies, corporations, and venture firms. His experience includes business development, innovation commercialization and venture capital roles at Accenture Ventures, Cisco Systems, HP, Microsoft and Samsung NEXT Ventures. Scott received his MBA from USC’s Marshall School of Business, and BA in Economics and Political Science from UCLA.
Faculty Directors
DataLab’s faculty directors support initiatives across the University.
Titus Brown, Associate Professor of Veterinary Medicine
Professor Brown serves as DataLab’s Director for Community Engagement. The Brown lab focuses on genomic, transcriptomic, and metagenomic sequence analysis. The lab is the primary developer of the khmer software, for faster and more efficient sequence analysis of high-throughput sequencing data. They also run quite a bit of training in data-intensive biology. Professor Brown serves on DataLab recruitment committees, teaches workshops, leads hackathons, and participates in our strategic activities and planning.
Bala Rajaratnam, Professor of Statistics
Professor Rajarantnam serves as DataLab’s Director for Research. He studies the theoretical and applied aspects of high dimensionality and extracting complex multivariate dependencies, including correlation-covariance estimation. His applied projects include applications in health and environmental sciences.
Staff
DataLab’s data scientists and administrative personnel.
Justin Babin, Research and Financial Analyst
Justin Babin holds a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration and Human Services from Notre Dame de Namur University. He has nearly two decades of professional experience in higher education finance and accounting. His interests include grant administration, budget development and forecasting, financial modeling and analysis, and compliance and internal controls.
Wesley Brooks, Data Scientist
Wesley Brooks is a research data scientist. He holds a PhD in Statistics and a MS in Biostatistics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he taught as a lecturer before joining DataLab. He conducted his postdoc in the Ecostats lab at the University of New South Wales, studying point processes and ecological statistics. His interests span from statistical computing to spatial statistics, nonparametric regression, and multimodel inference.
Elise Hellwig, Data Scientist
Elise Hellwig is a research data scientist. She holds a BA in Mathematics from Colorado College and graduate degree in Ecology from UC Davis where she investigated spatial variation in climate impacts on California’s agriculture. Elise is dedicated to bringing rigorous data and statistics practices to new groups, from college students to the CA State government. Her interests include statistics, spatial data analysis and visualization, Bayesian regression, and natural language processing.
Oliver Kreylos, Visualization Researcher
Oliver Kreylos is a computer scientist researching virtual reality and computer graphics, and their application to scientific data analysis. Kreylos received his PhD in Computer Science from UC Davis. He holds master’s degrees in Computer Science from UC Davis and the University of Karlsruhe, Germany. Kreylos developed the virtual reality user interface and research applications software for the UC Davis KeckCAVES and AR Sandbox.
Jie (Jessie) Li, Bioinformatics
Jessie specializes in bioinformatics with over a decade of experience analyzing ‘omics data. She collaborates with researchers across the biological sciences, from experimental design through analysis and interpretation, and offers bioinformatics training through office hours and workshops.
Nick Ulle, Senior Data Scientist
Nick Ulle is a statistician and computer scientist. He received a PhD and MS in Statistics from UC Davis, where he developed source code analysis techniques for the R programming language. He also received a BS in Mathematics from UC San Diego. Prior to joining DataLab he was a visiting assistant professor of Statistics at UC Berkeley, where he designed and taught courses in data science. His research interests include statistical computing, programming languages, data visualization, and pedagogy.
Postdoctoral Scholars
Graduate Student Researchers & Teaching Assistants
Hannah Houts, Experiential Education
Hannah is a PhD student in the Microbiology graduate group at UC Davis and a member of the Data Intensive Biology research lab. Her research focuses on applying computational tools to explore microbial evolution and ecology. Hannah is the TA for DataLab’s “Adventures in Data Science” series (STS 115 and 195).
Undergraduates
Joanna Deng, Intern
Joanna is majoring in Economics major (Statistics minor) and a Library 2026-2027 Internship Program. At DataLab she is developing digital content for data science and AI education, research, and outreach. Joanna is interested in quantitative finance and in using data to solve real-world problems. She is the co-founder of NC Tutoring (a youth-run 501(c)(3) nonprofit), runs a web design agency for small businesses, and builds her own software projects to tackle the needs she sees in her community. Joanna is bilingual in English and Mandarin.
Recent Lab Alumni
Colton Baumler, GSR for Experiential Education
Colton is a PhD candidate in Biochemistry, Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology at UC Davis in the Data Intensive Biology Lab. For his research, Colton writes bioinformatic software to answer biological questions, with a focus on biological sequences and mass spectra. To help researchers stay up to date on the research literature, Colton created and presented a series of workshops on open source software tools for scholarship and how to integrate them into our research workflows. Colton TA’d for DataLab’s “Adventures in Data Science” series (STS 115 and 195) in 2024-2025 and 2025-2026.
Nathalie Redick, Open Source Software
Nathalie completed her Master’s in Geophysics at UC Davis. Her research focused on improving slab shape models of the Cascadia subduction zone by linking predictions of the mantle flow around the slab from geodynamic models to seismic observations. Her interests include marine and volcano geophysics, seismology (especially seismic imaging and tomography), and machine/deep learning. Nathalie was a GSR for DataLab’s open source virtual reality project, Vrui, in 2025-2026. She is currently at PhD student in Seismology at Washington University in St. Louis.
Michele Tobias, Geospatial Data Specialist
Michele Tobias is now in the Scholarly Resources group within the UC Davis Library. Michele coordinates activities at Shields Library’s map room and helps researchers understand and design geospatial research projects from GIS data collection to analysis and cartography.
Xiaoguang (Apollo) Zhu, Postdoc
Apollo’s postdoctoral research focused on developing deep learning algorithms to predict cardiac disease progression and treatment outcomes. He used causality-aware methods to explore multimodal data with missingness to improve model generalization and improve individual patient care. His research mentors were Professors Uma Sirvastava and Nipavan Chiamvionvmat in Cardiology and Internal Medicine, and Chen-Nee Chuah in Electrical and Computer Engineering at UC Davis.
Federico Aprile, Intern
Federico majored in Computational Cognitive Science, with a minor in Data in Society. As a 2025-2026 intern at DataLab, he focused on “LibBot,” a chatbot project connecting researchers with relevant UC Davis Library guides and librarians. Federico is currently an intern at the UCSF Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute.
Phuong (Quynh) Tran, Thesis Student
Quynh completed an Honors Program Thesis project in DataLab in 2025-2026.
Chance Tokubo, Thesis Student
Chance completed an Honors Program Thesis project in DataLab in 2025-2026, focusing on webscraping play-by-play basketball data to analyze patterns in the “momentum” of college teams throughout a game to help inform team and individual strategy decision making.
Zeeva Chaver, Intern
Zeeva double majored in Computer Science and Statistics. As a 2025-2026 intern at DataLab, Zeeva worked on open source software development and community management for our Virtual Reality platform, Vrui. She is currently completing her Master’s in Statistics and Data Science at UC Berkeley.
Brian Le, Intern
Brian majored in Computer Science with minors in Statistics and Accounting. As a 2025-2026 intern at DataLab, Brian worked on a variety of applied data science projects.
Joey Suen, Intern
Joey majored in Statistics with a minor in Mathematics. As a 2025-2026 intern at DataLab, Joey worked on extracting data on funding contributions to the World Health Organization, and conducting exploratory data analysis and visualization.
Holden Tal, Intern
Holden majored in Sustainable Environmental Design. As a 2025-2026 Library Intern, Holden worked with DataLab on research projects analyzing and visualizing geospatial data.
Leon Tanguay, Intern
Leon majored in Computer Science with a minor in Spanish. As a 2024-2026 intern at DataLab, Leon is working on virtual reality software development, creating the web interface for the VRUI system, as well as developing an AI-powered data scraper for a collaborative project with UC Davis Grand Challenges.
Eustache Westphal, Intern
Eustache double majored in Computer Science and Economics. As a 2025-2026 intern at DataLab, Eustache contributed to a collaborative project with the Center for AI and Exploratory Futures on the discourse surrounding AI in scientific literature.
Michelle Viscaino, Postdoc
Michelle’s postdoc research leveraged state-of-the-art deep learning and generative AI to enhance the interpretability of digital subtraction angiography. By integrating multimodal data, including images and textual annotations, she aimed to precisely identify vascular anomalies critical for effective diagnosis and treatment planning. Her research mentors were Professors Roger Goldman in Radiology and Vladimir Filkov in Computer Science.
Saisha Shetty, GSR
Saisha Shetty completed her Master’s in Computer Science at UC Davis, working under the guidance of Professor Vladimir Filkov in Computer Science and Professor Roger Goldman in Radiology. She developed an LLM-powered tool to annotate radiology clinical reports, focusing on capturing relationships between entities to improve clinical data accuracy. She seeks to apply AI to healthcare, with a focus on making clinical processes more efficient and reliable.
Interested in joining DataLab?
Faculty, graduate students and postdoctoral scholars can apply to become a DataLab affiliates.
We routinely involve undergraduate students in our operations, geospatial services, and data science research projects. Students can be from any major at UC Davis. Contact us at datalab@ucdavis.edu if you are interested in getting involved.
Don’t have much experience but want to get involved?
Check out our 2-quarter intro to data science course!