BIDS Spring 2016 Data Science Faire

Saul Perlmutter is a 2011 Nobel Laureate, sharing the prize in Physics for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe. He is the director of BIDS, a professor of physics at UC Berkeley (where he holds the Franklin W. and Karen Weber Dabby Chair), and a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.  He is the leader of the international Supernova Cosmology Project, and executive director of the Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics. His undergraduate degree was from Harvard and his PhD from UC Berkeley.  In addition to other awards and honors, he is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.  Perlmutter has also written popular articles, and has appeared in numerous PBS, Discovery Channel, and BBC documentaries.  His interest in teaching  scientific-style critical thinking for scientists and non-scientists alike led to Berkeley courses on Sense and Sensibility and Science and Physics & Music.

Kevin Koy served as BIDS Executive Director from 2014-2017. He was responsible for the administration and operations of BIDS and worked to connect people with the data, methods, and tools to accelerate their research.
 
Before joining BIDS, Kevin directed the Geospatial Innovation Facility in the College of Natural Resources, where he successfully built a thriving community focused on sharing scientific expertise and helping people understand the changing world through the analysis and visualization of spatial data.
  
Before arriving at Berkeley, Kevin worked with the American Museum of Natural History's Center for Biodiversity & Conservation and the Smithsonian's Conservation Biology Institute. He conducted research throughout Southeast Asia using data from radio-collared animals, sensors, and satellites to better understand the history and needs of unique and endangered ecosystems.

Kevin received a BA in environmental studies and anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1998 and an MS in biology from George Mason University in 2003. He has also completed advanced graduate work in geography at the City University of New York with a focus on earth and environmental science.

BIDS Alum Justin Kitzes is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh. At BIDS, he was a data science fellow and a postdoctoral scholar in the Energy and Resources Group, where his research focused on the development and application of quantitative approaches for predicting the effects of land use and climate change on biodiversity. He has a particular interest in constraint-based theory and methods, such as maximum information entropy, and is currently working to apply this approach to predict the structure of ecological networks and community dynamics in time. He leads the development of the open source Python package macroeco, which supports the development of macroecological methods and their application to conservation. He also has a strong interest in education and training and is a core contributor with the group Software Carpentry, where he develops curriculum and teaches scientific computing workshops.

Fatma Deniz  (née Imamoglu) is a joint postdoctoral researcher at the Gallant Lab in UC Berkeley’s Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute and the International Computer Science Institute. She is interested in how sensory information is encoded in the brain and uses machine learning approaches to fit computational models to large-scale brain data acquired using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Fatma works at the intersection between computer science, linguistics, music, and neuroscience. Her current focus is on the cross-modal representation of language in the human brain. In addition, she works on improving internet security applications using knowledge gained from cognitive neuroscience (MooneyAuth Project). She is an enthusiastic teacher for Berkeley's data-8 connector course Data Science for Cognitive Neuroscience (Fall2016 and Spring2017) and an instroctor in Software Carpentry, where she teaches scientific computing. As an advocate of reproducible research practices she is the co-editor of the book titled “The Practice of Reproducible Research”. As a data science fellow, she is interested in teaching and reproducible research and sees herself as a connector between diverse domains. She is a passionate coder, runner, baker, and cello player.

Garret Christensen is a Financial Economist in the Division of Insurance and Research at the FDIC. His research interests include housing and consumer finance, poverty programs, and meta-science and reproducibility. Before joining the FDIC, Garret was an Economist with the US Census Bureau, a BIDS Data Science Fellow, and a research fellow with the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS), a program of the Center for Effective Global Action. He also taught economics at Swarthmore College and conducted water, sanitation, and hygiene research in western Kenya. He received his PhD in economics from the University of California, Berkeley, and has since conducted research for the WASH Benefits public health randomized trial for Innovations for Poverty Action and Emory University and has taught economics at Swarthmore College. 

Kellie Ottoboni is a former BIDS Data Science Fellow and a graduate of UC Berkeley's Department of Statistics. Her research at BIDS focused on using robust nonparametric statistics and machine learning to make causal inferences from data in the health and social sciences. The goal was to make reliable inferences while making minimal assumptions about the models generating the data. In addition to developing new statistical methods and studying their theoretical properties, Kellie wrote open source software implementing nonparametric methods in R and Python.

Zhao was previously a postdoctoral researcher with the AMPLab and a BIDS Data Science Fellow. He is currently a Research Associate at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). Zhao's research interests are in distributed computing, cloud computing and big data. Zhao designs computer systems to enable scientific applications on various computing platforms such as cluster, cloud, and supercomputers. He also works on scientific data management system to facilitate scientific research and discovery.

Stéfan van der Walt is a researcher at BIDS. He is the founder of scikit-image and co-author of Elegant SciPy.  Stéfan has been developing scientific open source software for more than a decade, focusing mainly on Python packages such as NumPy & SciPy. Outside work, he enjoys traveling, running, and the great outdoors.