My name is Matt. I’m an academic turned machine learning engineer passionate about sustainability and data-driven decision-making. A brief summary of my CV is below, or you can get more detail at my LinkedIn profile.
My goal with this site is to make it easier to understand programming, statistics, and science. For much of my life, I thought computer science and statistics just “weren’t my thing”, despite how interested I was in those topics. It took being forced to code extensively during my Ph.D. to overcome that intimidation and realize that these topics are accessible with a little patience. Hopefully this blog lowers the barrier of entry to others.
The landing page of this site is the blog posts in chronological order. The posts are organized by topic on the Blog page, where you can find academic advice for students, tips and tricks for Python and R, explorations of statistical and programming concepts, and more. For those of you interested in a deep dive into animal behavior research, the Academics page has links to publications from my academic life. (Some publications are under the surname Grobis; I changed my last name to Sosna when I got married.)
Success in a career is never independent, and I’ve been fortunate throughout my life to have the help of many people, most of whom I didn’t realize I should thank until much later. As such, I will always do my best to answer any questions this blog might attract. You can reach me at [my first name].[g].[my last name]@gmail.com.
Quick timeline
- 2008 - 2012: Studied Integrative Biology Honors at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- 2012 - 2013: Conducted research at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, funded by a U.S. Student Fulbright scholarship
- 2013 - 2018: Carried out a Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton, funded by a NSF-GRFP and NSF-DDIG
- 2018 - 2019: Worked as a machine learning engineer at SoKat
- 2019: Participated in the Clean Energy Leadership Institute Fellowship class of 2019
- 2019 - 2021: Worked as a data scientist at Aquicore
- 2020 - 2021: Tutored at the Trilogy Data Viz coding boot camp
- 2021 - present: Work as a machine learning engineer at Meta (Facebook)
About this site
This site is powered by Jekyll and is based on the Jekyll Now template. All blog posts are released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. All opinions and views are my own and do not represent my employer.