My academic and professional background is in fisheries biology. I completed my Master’s and Doctorate in Fisheries Science at South Dakota State University, and have worked professionally as a fisheries research biologist since 2017. Along this path I found I had an affinity for data analysis and the burgeoning suite of tools available for the types of work I was doing. I’ve become deeply familiar with the R environment and use it for nearly all elements of data analysis.
The type of work I do within R includes data wrangling, visualization, functional programming, simulation, and statistical modeling. I use Quarto and RMarkdown within RStudio to create reproducible reports that integrate code, analysis, and narrative text in one place. Additionally, I enjoy using R Shiny to develop interactive, data-driven tools that make complex analyses and visualizations accessible and actionable (see some examples on my Projects page).
Although my background is in natural resource management, my expertise can be helpful to a wide variety of data-driven businesses and organizations. I am available to help with any aspect of data workflows; from streamlining data collection to designing databases to cleaning up that mess of spreadsheets where your data currently live, all the way up to more exciting end products like interactive dashboards. In addition to making useful, actionable outputs, my approach to data analysis emphasizes building data structures and workflows that make the exciting, actionable end products easy to construct, reproduce, and generalize to similar tasks.
In addition to providing custom data analysis services, I use this website to share blog posts. I have benefited tremendously from the free contributions of R users and developers. My hope is to provide a small contribution to the community by sharing blog posts detailing how I apply these tools with real world examples.