Professional career

 
 
 
 
 

Data Analyst/R Programmer in Ecology

Queen’s University Belfast

Nov 2019 – Present Belfast, UK

Data Analyst within the Grassland Project

I am responsible for the manuscript writing and the analysis of the data collected during the Drought experiment, performed in 2017 across the island of Ireland. More information about the project can be found here.

 
 
 
 
 

Data Analyst/R Programmer

Queen’s University Belfast

Mar 2019 – Oct 2019 Belfast, UK

Data Analyst within the ProByFish project

Responsibilities include:

  • Data analysis and reorganisation
  • Validation of models
  • Version control
 
 
 
 
 

Scientific Assistant

Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf

Oct 2017 – Mar 2018 Düsseldorf, Germany
Supported lecturers involved in teaching the course “Zoology” within the Biology Bachelor programme at HHU and helped to establish a traininig course for Zoology on the e-learning platform.
 
 
 
 
 

PhD Student

University of Cologne

Oct 2014 – Feb 2019 Cologne, Germany

PhD project: Effects of natural phytoplankton trait diversity on Daphnia spp.

Responsibilities include:

  • Teaching assistance
  • Supervision of students (e.g. during their Bachelor thesis)
  • PhD club
  • R workshops
  • Pigment-analysis via HPLC and GC
  • Cultivation of isolated Daphnia clones

Skills

R

90%

Statistics

85%

Analytical Chemistry

75%

Mesocosm Experiments

70%

Plankton Taxonomy

60%

Photography

60%

Recent Publications

We found pronounced differences between naturally coexisting Daphnia longispina genotypes in their specific patterns of susceptibility …

Using dose-response growth experiments and bootstrapping to determine the growth and reproduction saturation thresholds, we show that …

Here we report significant variation in heat tolerance, measured as knock-out time (time until immobilization, Timm) in a single D. …

We found strong temporal and spatial variation in population density of larval salamanders along three headwater streams in the Eifel …

Recent & Upcoming Talks

Food security depends on the resilience of agro-ecosystems, that is their capacity to withstand extreme climatic events. This depends …

This course was mainly focused on GitHub and RMarkdown. I provided an introduction into version control and explained how RStudio can …

Biodiversity loss in aquatic ecosystems is believed to have cascading effects on multiple trophic levels. In particular the …

Following the seminar Data Visualization - Think before you plot!, I will discuss alternative ways of plotting summary statistics …

During the seminar, we will discuss some graphs from the literature that are misleading, wrong, hard to interpret or simply …

Teaching and Supervising

Workshop: Introduction to R

Content:

  • Introduction to R and RStudio
  • Packages
  • Projects
  • Data sets in R
  • Data types
  • Data structures
  • Data collection and import into R
  • Data management and processing with tidyverse
  • Data visualization with ggplot2
  • Functions
  • Loops
  • Package foreign
  • Package likert
  • Spatial data analysis

Workshop: GitHub and RMarkdown

Content:

  • Introduction to GitHub
  • Connecting RStudio and GitHub
  • Introduction to RMarkdown
  • Tips & Tricks for efficient code editing, incl. live coding
  • #PruittData
  • General discussion on data integrity

Workshop: Data Visualization Part II - Plotting in R using ggplot

Content:

  • Introduction to the package ggplot2
  • The ggplot logic
  • Aesthetics
  • Geoms
  • Themes
  • Scales
  • Annotations
  • Legend
  • Facetting
  • Multiple panels

Seminar: Data Visualization Part I - Think before you plot!

Content:

  • Misleading plots in the literature and how to improve them
  • Tips for scientific data presentation
  • Other sources e.g. R Graph Gallery
  • General discussion

Workshop: Data Manipulation with R

Content:

  • Data Manipulation with base r and tidyverse
  • Linear regression
  • Functions

Supervision of student projects

Students:

  • M. Etienne1 (2018), short research project, 1 month
  • L. Franke4 (2018), advised during phytoplakton pigment analysis via HPLC within BSc thesis, 2 months
  • L. Klar4 (2017), advised during phytoplakton pigment analysis via HPLC within BSc thesis, 2 months
  • N. Bogodukhova3 (2017), BSc thesis (in English), 4 months
  • S. Brehm1 (2016), BSc thesis (in German), 4 months
  • J. Krause1 (2016), Bsc thesis (in English), 4 months
  • E. Gosselin2 (2015), research internship, 3 months
  • S. Walden1 (2015), BSc thesis (in German), 4 months

From:
  1. University of Cologne, Germany
  2. University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
  3. Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf, Germany
  4. University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany

Teaching assistance

Courses:

  1. Methods and Techniques in Chemical Ecology (MSc program, in English)

    • High-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC)
    • Gas chromatography (GC)
  2. Experimental Ecology (BSc program, in German)

    • Introduction into aquatic ecology
    • Chemical ecology of organismal interactions

Teaching assistance

Courses:

  1. Botany (BSc program, in Germany)

    • Photosynthesis
    • Cell structure and physiology
    • Introduction to microscopy
  2. Cell Biology (BSc program, in Germany)

    • Cellular differentiation
    • Protein extraction
    • SDS-PAGE and Western Blotting
  3. Ecology (BSc program, in Germany)

    • Biodiversity
    • Ecosystems
    • Ecological niches
    • Interspecific interactions
    • Phenotypic plasticity
    • Population growth
  4. Evolutionary Biology (BSc program, in Germany)

    • Bioinformatics
    • Evo-Devo
    • Phylogenetics
    • Quantitative Genetics
  5. Molecular Plant Sciences (BSc program, in Germany)

    • Enzyme Kinetics
    • Hormones
    • Isolation of Proteins, RNA and DNA
    • Photosynthesis
  6. Statistics (BSc program, in Germany)

    • Statistical analysis with R
    • Parametric and non-parametric statistical tests
    • Linear models

Research related activities and responsibilities

Manuscript review (7) for Limnology, Scientific Reports, Environmental Reviews Biology, Aquatic Ecology, The American Naturalist and Environmental Science and Pollution Research

Responsible person for the standardized pigment analysis via HPLC

Adviser for the pigment analysis via HPLC and supervisor of students within a collaboration with the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany

Organizer of a regular group-internal PhD meeting

Organizer and lecturer of a weekly group-internal course on Statistical analysis and data visualization with R

Workshops

Career Advancement for Exceptional Female Scientists: Fast Tract to Independence

Population Growth Models with R

Time Series Analysis with R

Univariate Statistics in Ecology and Evolution

People

Co-Authors

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Christian Burberg

Current position - PhD Student in Aquatic Chemical Ecology

Cyanobacteria, Protease Inhibitors, LC-MS

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Christian Werner

Current position - PhD Student in Aquatic Chemical Ecology

Food quality, Polyunsaturated fatty acids, Analytical Chemistry, Molecular Biology

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Patrick Fink

Current position - Group leader in Department of River Ecology

Aquatic Chemical Ecology, Molecular Ecology, Algae-herbivore interactions, Biodiversity, Climate change, Food quality, Polyunsaturated fatty acids, Stable isotopes in ecology, Ecological stoichiometry, Maternal effects, Freshwater molluscs, Biogenic volatile organic compounds, Chemical communication / infochemicals, Inducible and activated defences

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Timm Reinhardt

Current position - Scientific staff in Animal Conservation

Conservational Biology, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolution, eDNA

BSc Students

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Julius Krause

Current position - MSc Student in Biomimetics - Mobile Systems

Biomimetics, Computational fluid dynamics (CFD)

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Michelle Etienne

Current position - MSc Student in Biology

Climate change, Nature conservation, Ecology, Ornithology

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Nadja Bogodukhova

Current position - MSc Student in Immunobiology at LIMES Institute

Epigenetics, Single cell transcriptomics

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Sina Brehm

Current position - MSc Student in Biological Sciences

Conservational Biology

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Susanne Walden

Current position - PhD Student in Terrestrial Ecology

Biodiversity, Protistology, Metagenomics

Student Assistants

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Daniel Schäfer

Current position - PhD Student in Cellular Immunotherapy

Oncology, Immunology, Cell therapy, Football (the good European version, not this crap from the royal colonies)

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Geraldine Bennertz

Current position - Biological Technical Assistant

Hematology, Immunology, Clinical Chemistry

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Sebastian Kallabis

Current position - PhD Student at CECAD (Cluster of Excellence - Cellular Stress Responses in Aging-Associated Diseases)

Molecular Biology, Analytical Chemistry, Mass-spectrometry, Protein-Protein Interaction, Phosphoproteomics, Proteomic Analysis, R

Internship Students

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Emma Gosselin

Current position - M.L.A. Student in Landscape Architecture and Urban Biodiversity Coordinator at Campus and Community Planning

Ecology, Biodiversity, Climate change, Sustainable landscape design

Recent Posts

Best of 2020

Game of Thrones Tour

I made it! I defended my PhD thesis!

ASLO in San Juan, Puerto Rico

Cladocera in Kulmbach

ASLO in Honolulu, Hawaii

DZG in Kiel

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