Introducing Michael Culshaw-Maurer

We are delighted to welcome Dr. Michael Culshaw-Maurer to The Carpentries. He is the first postdoctoral researcher to work with The Carpentries, and will be working jointly with Cyverse. We are excited by this partnership. Michael brings both teaching and community development experience and will work with the Curriculum Team to help with the Carpentries Incubator and the CarpentriesLab projects. He will help support the community in developing new lessons, and help create a lesson review process. We are thrilled to have him on the team!

Message from Michael

I am very excited to be joining The Carpentries as a postdoctoral researcher, jointly with CyVerse at the University of Arizona. It seems like just yesterday I finished Instructor Training, though it has been 3 years at this point! I am an ecologist by training, and I just finished my PhD in the Graduate Group in Ecology at University of California Davis studying the behavioral ecology of insect pests. I’ve also done research on maple syrup production, aquatic arthropods, and stream fish habitat, so my research interests span pretty widely.

During grad school I taught introductory R courses for undergraduate and graduate students and helped run the Davis R Users Group, all of which helped foster a love of teaching software and data skills. Having come to grad school with absolutely zero programming experience, I know full well how overwhelming the growing list of computational and data skills can be. I am passionate about helping researchers go from viewing these skills as unfortunate hurdles to powerful tools to help them pursue their research. I am thrilled to be joining a community with such strong commitments to strong pedagogy, open access curricula, and inclusive community building. You can find me on Twitter, my website, or send me an email at culshawmaurer@arizona.edu.