Hello! I’m grateful for your interest in doing research with me.
You can use this form to let me know you’re interested in working together
Student Research Assistants
I wrote this document to help clarify what I’m looking for in student research assistants.
Depending on your skills coming in, the ratio of time spent on skills development vs. mentoring will vary.
Prerequisites
This section attempts to answer the question “What should I study to do research with you?”, and it’s a partial answer to “What do you look for in research assistants?“.
The skill areas that are involved in my research are:
- Research Thinking
- Programming
- Data Analysis and Visualization
- Reading
- Writing
- Presenting
I’m working on a competency guide that lists specific skills within each area. Check back for this later. Send me an email to encourage me to get it done sooner :)
Research Thinking
- I expect most students will not have much experience with this
Programming
Most of the work is in Python. You should be familiar with the following at minimum:
- Basic Python syntax
- Control structures (if, for, while, …)
- Basic object-oriented programming (classes, objects, methods, simple inheritance patterns, …)
- Data structures (lists, dictionaries, sets)
- Structuring code into functions, modules, and packages
Programming Tools and Habits
- Be comfortable in a shell (bash, zsh, etc.)
- Be comfortable with a text editor (VSCode, Sublime, Atom, Vim, Emacs, Cursor, etc.
Python Libraries for AI/ML
The work usually involves several of the following libraries. Skills in these libraries are a plus. If you don’t know them already you will probably need to learn some of them.
- Pydantic
- Numpy
- Scipy
- Matplotlib
- Seaborn
- Altair
- Pandas
- Scikit-learn
- PyTorch
- JAX
- SpaCy
Data Analysis and Visualization
I’m looking for skills roughly at the level of having taken ECS163 @ UC Davis
Reading
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This area is one of the harder ones to write a competency guide for.
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Research started making sense to me after reading ~100 journal articles.
- This could mean that students should read a similar volume.
- It could also mean I’m inefficient at converting reading → thinking.
- You could ask other research faculty “How much do you have to read to make progress on your research (now and as a junior researcher)?” to get some perspective
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To gain skills in this area, start reading.
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If you’re unsure what to read and you’re interested in working with me, find one of my papers on Semantic Scholar, and start reading the references.
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I have a research reading template that could be helpful for you to take notes on papers you read — send me an email to request this.
Writing
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If you want to demonstrate skills in this area, send me a writing sample. Ideally this will be several pages of research-style writing on a technical topic. By “research-style”, I don’t necessarily mean a published article. I’m looking for you to have written something that engages with prior work — your writing sample should have a bibliography or references section if this is the case.
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To gain skills in this area, pick a technical topic that you are really interested in. Ask a question about this topic that you don’t know the answer to. Try to find out the answer by collecting and reading source material. Write a several-pages technical blog post about your selected topic.