010: From Ecology to Silicon Valley--Ted Hart found work he loved in industry

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