Ted leveraged his knowledge of computer programming and data management, gained while an ecology grad student, to become a data scientist. Listen to Ted's journey from ecology to Silicon  Valley!

Ted is a data scientist at a large company in Silicon Valley (he is not officially allowed to disclose what company he works for). He has a PhD in environmental biology from the University of Vermont. He has worked as a staff scientist at the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) prior to taking his current position.

Biggest Struggle

•  Needing to work and find his own funding in order to pay for his research.

Worst Moment

• Having a paper sent out for revision at Science but then getting rejected.

Best Moment

• Receiving his NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant (DDIG).

Mindful Minutes Segment

• Habit: Coding, data management, and writing good commit messages
• Book: (1) Doing Data Science: Straight Talk from the Frontline by Cathy O'Neil (2) An Introduction to Statistical Learning: with Applications in R by Garath James (3) Elements of Statistical Learning: Data Mining, Inference, and Prediction
• Productivity Tool: Git, GitLab, and GitHub
• Best Advice:Learn R
• Hobbies: Trail running, and if time permits skiing and rock climbing
• Alternative PhD study: Economics

Contact Information and Resources

• Twitter
• Software Carpentry
• Blog post on the tension between skill building and doing good research
• Simply Statistics
• Stanford online course
• John Hopkins Coursera

Intro and Outro Music: http://www.bensound.com/royalty-free-music - Happy Rock