Speaker(s)
Justin Kitzes
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.