Jennifer_Nafziger.txt

I am working on a PhD in Water Resources Engineering.  My research deals with rivers in the winter - from modelling physical ice processes to predicting winter time flooding events to winter habitat and hydropower.  I frequently work with ugly data files from field instruments - like water quality and meteorology sensors and survey data.  This includes lots of irregular time series data.  I do this mostly in R, as that is the common language used by the biologists I collaborate with.  I also solve equations numerically in MatLAB - or-gasp! - excel.  I am working on learning more Python.  I believe the Software Carpentry approach works well for researchers, but also for practising engineers - who often need to use programming to wrangle data, solve equations, or find a solution but are not in the business of building applications.  For both of these groups, good code, collaboration and reproducibility are very important.