About Will Cornwell

Feb 1, 2015 • Will Cornwell

Will Cornwell is an ecologist and a senior lecturer at UNSW in Sydney, Australia, interested in the functional diversity of plants. He teaches a number of classes in field biology, especially focused on plants.

He contributed to the R library called picante, which is for various types of phylogenetic anlyses, and has a few projects that will likely be released as R libraries in the not-so-distant future–one is a way to do fit different types of curves to organic matter decomposition trajectories and the other is a way to assess the adequacy of trait evolution models. He is also interested in improving the reproducibility of scientific analysis; for an extended take on where software tools currently are see a recent ROpenSci blog post.

He’s very interested in both new ways of communicating and demystifying technical subjects and especially any way to make all types of learning a more active experience.

What I found hardest about using Git the first time was…

It was (and still is) hard for me to keep all possible git workflows in my head. And when I started it was with a few different groups that used different workflows. I feel like at the beginnning if I had learned one workflow very well and then gradually added all the git nuances and complexity it would have been a less frustrating learning experience.