Rock Your Research with Chris Jones

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

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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

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            Rock Your Research with Chris JonesBy Chris Jones interviews PhDs about graduate school and careers to provide advice to graduate students!