Instructors

Instructor

Prof. Alison Hill (alison.hill@utoronto.ca)

Prof. Hill is a faculty member in the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology. She runs a research group studying the dynamics and evolution of human infectious diseases within patients and across populations. Her team develops mathematical, statistical, and computational models to predict disease trajectories and help design interventions. Before moving to U of T, she was faculty at Johns Hopkins, and did her graduate and post-graduate training at Harvard. Coding is still her favourite part of her job, and she has used R - along with other programming languages - for many large open-source computational projects focusing on diseases such as COVID-19, HIV, RSV, and the opioid crisis.

Teaching assistants

Jessie Wang (jae.wang@mail.utoronto.ca)

Jessie is a 4th year PhD student in the Frederickson lab at UTSG. She studies plant-microbe interactions using high- throughput experimentation in duckweeds. She fell in love with R during her time as an undergraduate and took EEB313 in 2020, simultaneously sharpening her coding skills while conducting research alone in the lab. Jessie loves to spend too much money on fancy coffee as she types away, making sure her code is well-annotated and her figures look beautiful. Outside of work, she enjoys caring for her many houseplants and aquariums, finding new delicious eats, and admiring other people’s pets.

Erik Curtis (erik.curtis@mail.utoronto.ca

Erik is a 2nd year PhD student interested in the epidemiology and population ecology of Pacific salmon, as well as the ecology of infectious diseases. In his PhD research, he is investigating the prevalence of co-infection in juvenile salmon. He’s also using eDNA metabarcoding to examine the coastal marine community concurrent with juvenile salmon migration and salmon farm activity. Prior to joining the MK lab, he studied at the University of Notre Dame, majoring in Biology and Math, where he examined the fate and transport of eDNA in experimental streams. 

Prior year course instructors

Mete Yuksel (2023 and 2024)

Zoe Humphries (2024)

Vicki Zhang (2022 and 2023)

Emma Walker (2021 and 2022)

Tia Harrison (2020 and 2021)

Amber Gig Hoi (2020)

Ahmed Hasan (2018 and 2019)

Sara Mahallati (2018)

James Santangelo (2018)

Madeleine Bonsma-Fisher (2017, 2018)

Lindsay Coome (2017, 2018)

Joel Ostblom (2017, 2018)

Luke Johnston (2017)

Lina Tran (2017)

Elliott Sales de Andrade (2017)

Other source material

Data Analysis and Visualization in R for Ecologists, Data Carpentry, https://datacarpentry.github.io/R-ecology-lesson/

Brian Seok, François Michonneau, Tobias Busch, Katrin Leinweber, Maneesha Sane, njlyon0, Ed Bennett, Hugo Tavares, Mike Mahoney, Paula Nieto, Susan Washko, Terry Loecke, Wasila Dahdul, xli677, Abhijna Parigi, Aleksander Jankowski, Allison Shay Theobold, Analytics Enlightened LLC, Anna K. Moeller, … vmzhang. (2024). datacarpentry/R-ecology-lesson: Data Carpentry: Data Analysis and Visualization in R for Ecologists 2024-07 (v2024.07). Zenodo https://zenodo.org/records/12684301

Christie Bahlai, Reproducible Quantitative Methods, https://cbahlai.github.io/rqm-template/

Publications

Johnston LW, Bonsma-Fisher M, Ostblom J, Hasan AR, Santangelo JS, Coome L, Tran L, Andrade ES, Mahallati S. A graduate student-led participatory live-coding quantitative methods course in R: Experiences on initiating, developing, and teaching. Journal of Open Source Education. 2019;2: 49. doi:10.21105/jose.00049