Skills

BaseCamp – I used BaseCamp project management at both the USDA and Vanderbilt University to organize and share large projects with collaborators and student workers.

Course development – At LSU, I spent time as a teaching assistant for a handful of classes, including introductory biology lab for majors, principals of ecology lab, course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE), independent research, and marine communities lab. In ecology lab, I worked closely with the course coordinator (Barry Aronhime) to develop new labs. As a TA in the CURE program, it was my job to develop rubrics for new assignments and work in social media for the traditional writing assignments. In the independent research course I taught, I developed the course from just an idea and taught students the scientific method with a focus on science communication. See my blog post here about the experience and check out the students’ posters.

Experimental Design – I have years of experimental design experience. I have designed completely randomized, randomized block design, and repeated measures experiments. I have also assisted researchers over the last decade plan and set-up experiments, as well as collect data.

Exploratory Statistics – I have taken four semesters of statistics during my undergraduate and graduate studies. I studied exploratory methods specifically in my multi-variate statistics course at LSU. At the USDA, I used exploratory statistics when given a new dataset to understand how the variables correlate and determine which major trends may be important to further develop.

Grant Writing – I have written several grant proposals over the last ten years. As a graduate student, I received three grants from the BioGrads organization at LSU. I also won two awards from the Louisiana Department of Fish and Wildlife to fund my research of crop pests. I collaborated on grant proposals for large grants from the NSF and USDA during my postdoctoral research. At Vanderbilt, I served an administrative function for an NIH New Training Grant application and successfully wrote grants for a small outreach project and a deep dive into the history of evolution at Vanderbilt.

LaTeX – Throughout my Ph.D., I wrote my manuscripts using LaTeX with citations coming from an independent BibTex file. While this is my preferred method for putting together a publication quality manuscript, I tend to do most of my writing in Word using other reference management as some journals still do not work with LaTeX files.

Loomly – I used Loomly to organize and post across social platforms including Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and TikTok.

MailChimp – I briefly used MailChimp at Vanderbilt university to design and send monthly newsletters.

Microsoft Office – I use the suite of Microsoft products for everything I do in research. I use Microsoft Word to write manuscripts and edit result output from R. I use PowerPoint for presentations. I use Outlook for email and Calendar to keep up with my daily schedule.

MyEmma – I used MyEmma at Vanderbilt university to design and send monthly newsletters.

R programming – I use R programming for data analysis and results presentation. I am proficient in statistics from t-tests and regressions to model fitting. I work frequently with p-values, AIC scores, and bootstrapped confidence intervals.  In my first scientific manuscript (found here), I used R to demonstrate ways to showcase insect diversity for educational purposes.

SAS – At LSU, my statistics courses were taught in R. While I use SAS only occasionally, I am confident I can do any statistical analyses in SAS that I can do in R.

Science Communication – I am versed in a multitude of science communication platforms. I maintain this site with infrequent updates for those following along. I maintain the Brunet Lab Twitter account, which is active just about daily. I have published (as first and other author) several manuscripts. I have also written grant proposals and reports to funding agencies. I taught students to present their results as both a TA at LSU and as a postdoctoral scholar with the USDA.

Social Media – I taught students how to use social media for science as a TA at LSU and as a postdoctoral researcher with the USDA. I find Twitter particularly useful for discussions of scientific methods and keeping up to date on all the most important subject-specific news. I maintain the Brunet Lab Twitter account, which can be found here.

Spanish – In primary school, I spent two weeks in Mexico learning about Mayan culture and living with a host family. As an undergraduate, I completed nine courses in Latin and Spanish conversation, literature, and culture. During this time, I lived with a host family while studying abroad for two months in Cuenca, Ecuador. In graduate school, I participated in a tropical ecology course in Costa Rica.

Tableau – In 2020, I spent two months tracking the COVID-19 outbreak and making figures in Tableau. I used data available from the CNN website, which were collected from each state’s department of public health. At the time, there were no state by state graphs of COVID-19 cases over time. Therefore, I created and maintained these graphs for about two months. The most recent version (4/27/2020) can be found here.

Umbraco – I used Umbraco to develop the official Brunet Lab website (here).

WordPress – I have maintained a handful of websites over the years in WordPress. The site you are currently viewing was created in WordPress.