Hi!

I’m Michael D. Catchen (he/him).

I’m a Research Software Engineer / Data Scientist at the Schmidt Center for Data Science and Environment at the University of California, Berkeley. I work on open-source infrastructure for bioacoustic monitoring using machine learning.

Before this, I was an IVADO Postdoctoral Fellow in the Poisot Computational Ecology Lab at the Université de Montréal. I received my PhD from McGill University under the supervision of Dr. Andy Gonzalez, working on computational methods to understand the biogeography and dynamics of species interaction networks. There, my research focused on species distribution modeling using machine learning, making “black-box” ML models interpretable for environmental management and conservation decision making, and designing biodiversity monitoring programs to best understand how human activity is changing life on Earth. I was also usually doing some networky (and at least tangentially ecological) stuff on the side.

Besides software and science, I like nature, cooking, punk music, breakfast burritos, life, math for it’s own sake, and a bunch of other things. If you want to talk about science, or something else, hit me up.