Recent Posts

Exciting publication news!

I wanted to make a quick (and somewhat belated) post announcing that my paper about the life history strategies of tetrapods was …

Getting your own Google API credentials for R

Inspiration for this post My quest to make Google Drive play nice with R continues! If you’ve read my last post, you’ll know the …

Publishing to RStudio Connect with Google credentials

Inspiration for this post As a data scientist, I frequently need to pull data from disparate sources and combine it in an automated …

Scheduling R Scripts

Inspiration for this post Since starting my job as a data scientist, I found myself setting dozens of reminders on my calendar to run …

Adding featured images to posts

Inspiration for this post When I updated my website to the latest version of Hugo Academic a few months ago, I realized that I could …

Recent Publications

Macroevolution of dimensionless life history metrics in tetrapods

Life-history traits represent organisms’ strategies to navigate the fitness trade-offs between survival and reproduction. Eric …

Preprint: Macroevolution of dimensionless life history metrics in tetrapods

Life history traits represent organism’s strategies to navigate the fitness trade-offs between survival and reproduction. Eric …

New approaches for delineating n‐dimensional hypervolumes

Hutchinson’s n‐dimensional hypervolume concept underlies many applications in contemporary ecology and evolutionary biology. …

Recent & Upcoming Talks

Sad strategies: making really bad ideas work for you

I gave this talk as part of Biology on Tap, a monthly event for biology popular science talks.

Talk: Delineating parapatric ranges using species distribution models and support vector machines: An example with three-toed sloths (Bradypus)

Despite growing understanding that biotic interactions may impose important constraints on distributional limits, species distribution …

Poster: Improving species range estimates for an arboreal species group with a parapatric distribution

Using support vector machines to mask out biotically unsuitable areas improves species range estimates for Bradypus.

Talk: Using SVMs to delineate parapatric ranges: An example with three-toed sloths (Bradypus)

Species distribution modeling (SDM) techniques are a common tool for estimating species ranges. These models typically rely only only …

Big vs. Small: Using ratios to compare life history strategies

I gave this talk to high school students in the first year of the Brown Scholars program to start off their unit on paleoneurobiology.

Projects

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Mental health outcomes

Investigating mental health outcomes.

Distribution modeling of Bradypus

Species distribution modelling of Bradypus variegatus, B. tridactylus, and B. torquatus.

Hypervolume package testing

Testing new algorithms for creating n-dimensional hypervolumes.

Tetrapod life history traits

Analyzing the evolution of dimensionless life history metrics across tetrapods.

Teaching

I teach high school women computer programming skills. You can find a description of their internship and lesson plans in the following GitHub repository: https://github.com/babichmorrowc/SlothSquad2018-9. If you have any questions about these resources, please let me know!

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Cecina Babich Morrow

Compass PhD Program

University of Bristol

I am currently a PhD Student at the University of Bristol in the Compass program.

From the fall of 2019 to the fall of 2023, I worked as a data scientist at Spring Health, a start-up delivering precision mental healthcare. I worked to understand the impact of therapy and psychiatry appointments on patients’ depression and anxiety, as well as analyzing member behavior as part of the Member Experience team.

Previously, I was a Helen Fellow at the American Museum of Natural History. I worked with Mary Blair in the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation on the open-source species distribution modeling software Wallace. In addition to working on testing and expanding the Wallace software, I modeled the distributions of three species of three-toed sloths to better understand the biogeography of these species.

During my undergraduate degree at Kenyon College, I worked with Drew Kerkhoff in the Kenyon Macroecology Laboratory. As a Kenyon Summer Science Scholar in 2016, I collaborated with researchers at the University of Arizona and Oxford University to develop and test new hypervolume methods for quantifying plant functional diversity and environmental niches. My senior honors thesis used these hypervolume methods to compare dimensionless life history stratgies across tetrapods to examine how these traits have evolved in response to different evolutionary pressures.

Interests

  • Data Science
  • Macroecology
  • Life History Traits
  • Species Distribution Modeling

Education

  • PhD in Computational Statistics and Data Science, In progress

    University of Bristol

  • BA in Biology and Mathematics, 2018

    Kenyon College

Contact

Experience

 
 
 
 
 

Compass PhD Program

University of Bristol

September 2023 – Present Bristol, UK
I am working towards my PhD in Computational Statistics and Data Science. In my PhD project, I will be using Bayesian decision analysis to support climate adaptation decision-making. This project is supervised by Dr Laura Dawkins, Dr Dan Bernie, and Dr Dennis Prangle.
 
 
 
 
 

Data Scientist

Spring Health

September 2019 – August 2023 New York, NY
I use data to remove barriers to mental healthcare. On the Spring Health research & development team, I work to improve the mental healthcare experience for employees using Spring Health.
 
 
 
 
 

Helen Fellow

American Museum of Natural History

September 2018 – August 2019 New York, NY
I conducted research with Dr. Mary Blair in the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation and taught high school girls computer programming skills. In my own research, I studied the species distributions of three species of three-toed sloths. I also worked with my high school interns to develop their own research project investigating these species.
 
 
 
 
 

Kenyon College Macroecology Lab

Kenyon College

August 2016 – May 2018 Gambier, OH
I worked with Dr. Drew Kerkhoff on research combining ecology/evolution with mathematics/computation. As a 2016 Kenyon Summer Science Scholar, I collaborated with researchers at the University of Arizona and Oxford University to develop and test new “hypervolume” methods for quantifying plant functional diversity and environmental niches. From the summer of 2017 through the spring of 2018, I worked on my Senior Honors project to use hypervolume methods to explore the macroevolution of tetrapod life histories.
 
 
 
 
 

Turtles Project Intern

Arizona Game and Fish Department

May 2015 – July 2015 Phoenix, AZ
I worked with Cristina Jones and herpetology researchers at AZGFD to conduct fieldwork assessing populations of native reptiles and amphibians, as well as managing department databases. I got to work with narrow-headed gartersnakes, Chiricahua leopard frogs, desert tortoises, and many more amazing herps.