Our Team

Carl Stahmer is a digital humanist. He leverages his expertise as a computer programmer and system architect to tackle complex problems in the humanities and beyond. Stahmer received his PhD in English from UC Santa Barbara. He is a professor in English at UC Davis and was head of the former Data and Digital Scholarship unit in the Library. He is a member of the teaching faculty at the Rare Book School, University of Virginia. His research interests include applications of natural language processing, computer vision, and library science.

Pamela Reynolds is an experimental biologist with a background in team science and project management. At DataLab she works to connect and train students, faculty and staff with computational tools and thinking to enable innovative interdisciplinary research. Reynolds received her PhD in Biology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She holds dual bachelor’s degrees in Biological Sciences and Nature and Culture (English) from UC Davis, and for her postdoc co-lead a global research network. Her research interests also include developing pedagogy for teaching technical skills.

Michele Tobias is a geospatial data scientist with a background in geospatial methods for ecology. Michele earned her PhD from UC Davis in Geography where she studied California’s sandy beach ecosystem with traditional phytosociological methods and innovative remote sensing tools and was a postdoc at the UC Davis Information Center for the Environment. At DataLab, she applies geospatial tools to new avenues of research across disciplines.

Tyler Shoemaker is a Postdoctoral Scholar. He holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from UC Santa Barbara and conducts research on media history and the digital humanities. At the DataLab, Tyler develops and implements methods for text analysis and natural language processing across a variety of research projects, ranging from literary studies to environmental and health sciences.

Wesley Brooks is a research data scientist. He holds a PhD in Statistics and an MS in Biostatistics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he taught as a lecturer before joining DataLab. He was a postdoc in the Ecostats lab at the University of New South Wales, studying point processes and ecological statistics. His interests span from statistical computing to spatial statistics, nonparametric regression, and multimodel inference.

Arthur Koehl is a research data scientist. He graduated from UC Davis with degrees in history and economics and a minor in computer science. His interests include natural language processing, computer vision, and web programming. At the DataLab he develops tools and provides technical expertise on interdisciplinary research projects in the humanities and social sciences.

Nick Ulle is a statistician and computer scientist. He received a PhD and MS in Statistics from UC Davis, where he developed source code analysis techniques for the R programming language. He also received a BS in Mathematics from UC San Diego. He was a visiting assistant professor of Statistics at UC Berkeley, where he designed and taught courses in data science. His research interests include statistical computing, programming languages, data visualization, and pedagogy.

Oliver Kreylos is a computer scientist researching virtual reality and computer graphics and their application to scientific data analysis. Kreylos received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Davis. He holds master’s degrees in Computer Science from UC Davis and the University of Karlsruhe, Germany. Kreylos is also affiliated with the UC Davis W.M. Keck Center for Active Visualization in the Earth Sciences KeckCAVES.

Glenda Gaines holds a bachelor’s degree in Political Science from University of California, San Diego. “From the standpoint that all things are political—from the votes we cast, to the food we eat, to the shelter we seek—it is the art of governance that maintains the ability to not only define the human condition but improve upon it.” Glenda Gaines 

Breanne Weber is a PhD Candidate in English with an emphasis in Science and Technology Studies. Her research explores 16th and 17th century British literature via the intersections of early scientific and material epistemologies, book history, and the digital humanities. Breanne is responsible for communications and outreach at the DataLab.

Liza Wood is an environmental social scientist, earning a PhD in Ecology with an emphasis in Computational Social Science. She studies innovation systems and policies related to agricultural seeds. Her research looks at how plant genetic material is accessed and managed to understand agricultural systems’ readiness for climate change. Liza holds master’s degrees in Sustainability Science and Organic Farming and has conducted food systems research from a variety of disciplines.

Professor Brown serves as DataLab’s Director for Community Engagement.  The Brown lab focuses on genomic, transcriptomic, and metagenomic sequence analysis. The lab is the primary developer of the khmer software, for faster and more efficient sequence analysis of high-throughput sequencing data. They also run quite a bit of training in data-intensive biology. Professor Brown serves on DataLab recruitment committees, teaches workshops, leads hackathons, and participates in our strategic activities and planning. His lab also runs the “Meet and Analyze (biological) Data” (aka MAD) weekly drop-in office hours.

Professor Filkov serves as DataLab’s Director for Translational Data Science.  He is a data scientist specializing in a number of applied areas including Empirical Software Engineering, Systems Biology and Gene Networks in Plants, Applied Network Theory, and Data Mining and Algorithms.

Professor Rajarantnam serves as DataLab’s Director for Research. He studies the theoretical and applied aspects of high dimensionality and extracting complex multivariate dependencies, including correlation-covariance estimation. His applied projects include applications in health and environmental sciences.