United World Challenge

After many years of planning, my friend Tez embarked on a solo row from San Francisco to Hawaii to raise funds for scholarships at the United World Colleges. Through his project, the United World Challenge, he raised more than $76,000. When Tez asked for my support, I knew I was in! While he rowed, I created introductory programming activities from the comfort of my couch. The activities are inspired by his odyssey, and use publicly available data collected near his path.

research project with middle and high school students

Every year, San Diego’s Ocean Discovery Institute partners with one local ocean scientist to develop a year-long research project for a group of low income, middle school students. Inspired by a Wired article, I decided to center our project on coding so the students could develop additional hireable skills. The 10+ coding activities in R can be used to introduce programming, mathematical concepts, Cartesian coordinates, as well as ocean data analysis using waves generated in a tank. If you are not familiar with GitHub, start with the ReadMe.

intro to R for oceanographers

In spring 2015, Eiren Jacobson and I developed and taught a graduate-level introduction to R at SIO. The course material was recently made available online. Students and instructors will find 9 weeks of activities ranging from introducing basic programming skills (if statements, for loops) and libraries (ggplot2, oce) to binning CTD data and more.

merging grain size distributions

One of my first experiences with sharing code was during my Master’s degree when I modified a Matlab code developed by John Newgard to be an easily downloaded and set up package, compatible with both Windows and Mac operating systems. The code is still downloaded by various users to merge grain size distributions obtained with a Beckman Coulter Multisizer 3.