I am a PhD student in Evolution, Ecology and Organismal Biology at the University of North Carolina and a research assistant in the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center’s informatics group where I build tools for making phylogenies more accessible. My research is in computational large-scale ecology and involves large, heterogeneous datasets. As an undergraduate, I worked with Ethan White of Utah State Univeristy (also involved in SWC.) I’ve attended SWC workshops at both USU and UNC. I taught myself to program at a young age (in QBASIC) and am passionate about sharing that knowledge with others, and I’ve seen the huge transformation that research labs can undergo after learning some basic skills like simple text file manipulation in Python and version control.