potterzot

About

I am a phd student (starting Fall 2016) in the economics program at Washington State University, where I work with the Center for Sustaining Agriculture and Natural Resources and professor Michael Brady. My research interests are statistics and software, especially bayesian modeling and causal inference, with application to questions of agriculture and natural resources, human behavior, and development economics.

I'm an open science advocate and long-time open source user. I believe in the power of collaborative communities and human ingenuity. Software Carpentry and reproducible research methods are close to my heart. I've been a Linux user for over 15 years, and currently run Arch Linux on my laptop. I write software with vim, sublime text, and Rstudio. I tend to use Amazon EC2 instances for quick testing, and also for setting up longer-term projects when necessary.

I've written several R packages and a few python programs: rnassqs provides easy access to USDA agricultural data from the NASS QuickStats API, rkclass provides instrumental variables regression analysis in R, though there are better packages to use for that. Most of my work is available on my github profile. Written work is available here.

The code to generate this site is open source and available on the site repository, which now includes an extensive note-taking system, as well as links to my bibtex library and get_paper.py, a python script that fetches published article metadata when provided with a DOI.

I'm infrequently active on twitter, where I mostly follow an assortment of awesome data people.

I also write some fiction, and in early mornings, you can usually find me on one of my favorite running trails.