About me
Short version
Research software engineer: sometimes more software, sometimes more research. Personal site; opinions are my own.
My resume is here (in case you’re on your phone and can’t see the links in the sidebar).
Longer version
Software
My experience in graduate school made me very aware of the role of software in science. Today I am an active member of the scientific Python community. I use the core scientific Python libraries daily, and I have also made (minor) contributions to some of those libraries. See my GitHub profile here: https://github.com/NickleDave. I am also the lead maintainer of a software community for acoustic communication research, VocalPy. For more on VocalPy, please see http://www.vocalpy.org/. Last but not least, I am a reviewer and editor for pyOpenSci, as well as a past Editor in Chief, and I am one of the chairs of the organizing committee for the SciPy conference.
Research
At heart I am a biologist, but I borrow a lot from artificial intelligence, machine learning, cognition, and neuroscience.
I care about how and why animals communicate, and when I can I try to make that easier for everyone to study. My PhD was in neuroscience, and my post-doctoral work was in cognitive science. My dissertation work in the Sober lab showed that connections which are known to be important for learning motor skills in humans and other mammals are also found in regions of the songbird brain that are important for learning song. As a post-doctoral researcher, I worked with Astrid Prinz on brain-inspired algorithms for continual machine learning, as part of a DARPA program. For more on this research, please see this section of my GitHub profile page: https://github.com/NickleDave#visual-search-and-visual-attention. For published papers and related work, please see my Google Scholar profile.
I am also passionate about open scholarship, broadly defined. I am a trained Carpentries instructor, and helped found a graduate data science group at Emory.
Personal
I like to hike, do a bad job of being an amateur birdwatcher, play video games, and fumble around on guitar. Before 2020 happened, I used to dance salsa and bachata. In a previous life I was a rock star and an underground cartoonist.