Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Division of Plant Science and Technology
Adjunct Professor
Research at a glance
Area(s) of Expertise
Research Summary
I work at the intersection of mathematics, data science, and plant biology. I am mainly interested in quantifying shapes and patterns seen across plants. How heart-shaped is a heart-shaped leaf? How messy is a messy root? How patterny is a cell pattern in the plant stem?
I am an Assistant Professor for Data Science at the Division of Plant Science & Technology with an adjunct appointment in Math. I am mainly interested in understanding and modeling plant morphology using topological data analysis (TDA). I am also interested in morphometrics, developmental plant biology, basic image processing, directional statistics, and data science for social justice. I go by he/él pronouns.
I got my Ph.D. from the Department of Computational Mathematics, Science and Engineering (CMSE) at Michigan State University. I worked under the guidance of Dan Chitwood and Liz Munch. Before that, I got my math degree from the Universidad de Guanajuato with extensive support from the Mathematics Research Center (CIMAT). During my undergraduate degree, I tried to quantify the morphology of pre-Columbian masks with TDA, and how this might reveal their culture of origin.
Educational background
- Ph.D., Michigan State University (Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering)
- B.S., Universidad de Guanajuato (Mathematics)
Courses taught
- PLNT_SCI 2500 (Data Science for Life Sciences I)
- PLNT_SCI 3550 (Data Science for Life Sciences II)