I'm Kaija (rhymes with Maya). I'm a biologist and data scientist.
🐦 Currently, I'm a PhD candidate in the Pinter-Wollman lab at UCLA, studying the movement ecology and social behavior of vultures.
🐸 I have a B.S. in E&EB (Ecology & Evolutionary Biology) from Yale, where I studied wood frog tadpoles for my thesis project. I investigated whether a tradeoff between development rate (e.g. how fast the tadpole gets bigger and grows legs) and performance (e.g. how fast the tadpole startle-swims when it gets attacked by a predator when you poke its tail with a stick) could help explain countergradient variation in development rate. If you want to learn more, I gave a talk. The results are published here. Email me at kaija.gahm@aya.yale.edu to get access to a PDF if you hit a paywall on that link!
I work mostly in R, although I've dabbled in MATLAB, and I'd like to learn Python soon.
Some other things about me:
🐟 I recently finished working as a database manager for a freshwater ecology project with the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies and the Jones Lab at Notre Dame. I tracked issues for that over here. I also built a Shiny app to help researchers locate the lakes in their study.
💬 I also worked on linguistics with the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project (YGDP) to manage their research data. Check out the interactive Shiny dashboard that I built from scratch, without knowing anything about Shiny going in (code here). I also built a relational database for the YGDP.
✍️ My blog, which covers mostly R-related topics, has recently migrated from its old location at woodpeckR to a page on my personal site. The old woodpeckR site is still valid, though!
🤝 I volunteer as a mentor in the R For Data Science community Slack workspace, where I hold weekly "office hours". I also answer questions over at RStudio Community.
🧑🤝🧑 I'm also on the board of directors for SORTEE (Society for Open, Reliable, and Transparent Ecology and Evolutionary biology), which advocates for open science and reproducibility in EEB.
📫 How to reach me: I love getting emails at (kaija.gahm@aya.yale.edu). Twitter DMs are also great (@kaija_bean).
😄 Pronouns: She/her