Cody Markelz is generally interested in the complexities of interactions in nature and chooses problems that require (at least) a paper and pencil to work out. He uses data and mathematical models as tools to understand the beauty and complexity of nature. Currently, Cody is a BIDS-Accenture Data Science Research Scholar working at the intersection between invasive species, climate change and wildfire in Californian ecosystems. His project involves developing probabilistic models that work with newly collated datasets and meta-data to work across environmental scales to understand wildfire spread and impact. During his graduate work as an NSF GRFP, he studied the effects of elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide and water availability on plant carbon and nitrogen metabolism. He then blended this eco-physio-genomics training with computational and quantitative genetics to build genetically informed growth models of Brassica rapa and Arabidopsis thaliana as part of an NSF postdoc fellowship at UC Davis. More recently, Cody co-founded and was the VP of Genomics at Rev Genomics, which uses genomics, statistics, molecular genetics, and tissue culture to create new strains of Cannabis for the legal market. Rev Genomics was funded by Y-Combinator and continues to innovate in the Cannabis biotech space.
Projects
