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.
Glenda Gaines, Administrative Manager
Glenda Gaines holds a bachelor’s degree in Political Science from University of California, San Diego. From the standpoint that all things are political—from the votes we cast and the food we eat to the shelter we seek and the work we do—I believe it is the art of governance that maintains the ability to not only define the human condition but improve upon it.
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.
Michele Tobias, Geospatial Data Specialist
Michele Tobias is a geospatial data scientist with a background in geospatial methods for ecology. Michele earned her PhD from UC Davis in Geography where she studied California’s sandy beach ecosystem with traditional phytosociological methods and innovative remote sensing tools. Prior to joining DataLab she was a postdoc at the UC Davis Information Center for the Environment. At DataLab she applies geospatial tools to new avenues of research across disciplines.
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
DataLab’s inaugural TRANSCEND (translational health data science) postdoctoral program cohort.
Michelle Viscaino
Michelle is leveraging 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, her goal is to precisely identify vascular anomalies critical for effective diagnosis and treatment planning. Her research mentors are Professors Roger Goldman in Radiology and Vladimir Filkov in Computer Science.
Xiaoguang Zhu
Xiaoguang’s research focuses on developing deep learning algorithms to predict cardiac disease progression and treatment outcomes. He uses causality-aware methods to explore multimodal data with missingness to improve model generalization and improve individual patient care. His research mentors are Professors Uma Sirvastava and Nipavan Chiamvionvmat in Cardiology and Internal Medicine, and Chen-Nee Chuah in Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Graduate Student Researchers & Teaching Assistants
Colton Baumler, GSR for Experiential Education
Colton is a PhD student in Biochemistry, Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology at UC Davis. 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.
Saisha Shetty, GSR for Health Data Science
Saisha Shetty is a Master’s student in Computer Science at UC Davis, working under the guidance of Professor Vladimir Filkov (Computer Science) and Professor Roger Goldman (Radiology). She is developing an LLM-powered tool to annotate radiology clinical reports, focusing on capturing relationships between entities to improve clinical data accuracy. Her research interests lie in applying AI to healthcare, with a focus on making clinical processes more efficient and reliable.
Priyal Soni, GSR for Open Source Sustainability
Coming soon!
Students & Interns
Aliza Shahab, Administrative Student Assistant
Aliza is a third-year undergraduate majoring in Managerial Economics.
We’re Hiring!
Technical & Admin Student Assistants
Interested in joining DataLab? We routinely hire students to support our operations, geospatial services, and data science research projects. Students can be from any major at UC Davis.
Contact us at datalab-recruit@ucdavis.edu if you are interested in applying.
Don’t have much experience but want to get involved?
Check out our 2-quarter intro to data science course!