Hello world, this is me
by Pip Karoly
If you picked up on both the programming and Saddle Club references in the above title, you may consider yourself truly multi-disciplinary.
I’m Pippa, the newbie MATLAB
research community coordinator for ResBaz. I’m stoked to become part of the
ResBaz data-wranglers team, especially since I just read everyone else’s intro posts for some
inspiration and these guys are legends!
So what is there to know about me? I love MATLAB but I didn’t always. When I first had to use MATLAB as an undergrad engineer I found it awful. But I got there in the end and now I love programming. Too much actually - it’s gone from scary to enjoyable to addictive.
MATLAB then
MATLAB now
Apart from working for ResBaz, I’m a PhD student at the University of Melbourne, in the NeuroEngineering Research Lab. I have an office at St Vincent’s hospital, where I work with a lovely team of engineers, neurologists, statisticians, and mathematicians in epilepsy research. My research is in computational and statistical models of the brain to help understand (maybe even predict) seizure dynamics, and I have LOTS of data to wrangle.
Confession time - I just realised (after being a data-wrangler for over a month) that I don’t know the definition of wrangle. Google informs me that to wrangle (verb) is to:
1)
round up, herd, or take charge of
2) have a long, complicated dispute or argument.
Or, in other words
1) How I think I handle my data
2) How I actually handle my data
Just kidding, I love data. And I’m a big advocate for cool and
creative data visualization, to communicate research to the public. For instance this is one of my fave (and okay, not very scientific) visualizations of cocktail recipes.
SO much info packed in one beautiful, fridge-pinnable graphic (see it full size here). Oh and it was made with AutoCAD - nice!
What else do you need to know about me? I can always be bribed with chocolate. I dislike inspirational quotes and instant coffee. I’m actually quite terrible at social media. I mean, I really am – don’t make meme jokes to me
Did I mention I’m pretty great at making dad-jokes?
I’m also planning some new MATLAB courses later
this year and will be attempting to gamify the learning process with codathon
challenges held at Tsubu – so keep an eye on our events calendar. And I generally enjoy meeting other researchers so
if you ever feel like a coffee/chat/coding-sesh you can find me at Hacky Hour
or hit me up on Twitter @pjkaroly.
Goodbye (and hello!)
Pippa
