Posts

The key word in data science is still science

My last post before starting my lab went up in October 2022. It was a revisit of a famous commentary by Jeff Leek, so now that I am writing again, it seems fitting to pick…
Oct 11, 2026
3 min

How I built a low-maintenance Quarto website over a weekend with an AI assistant

This is my first blog post as a faculty member, and my first in almost four years. The last one went up in October 2022, a few months before I started my lab at Cornell, and…
Oct 4, 2026
6 min

A re-visit to the famous Jeff Leek commentary

Update, October 2026: this post has a follow-up, The key word in data science is still science.
Oct 20, 2022
4 min

Yearender: Looking back at 2021

Every year a set of memes is circulated widely on social media, the 2022 version of which goes along the lines of:
Dec 31, 2021
4 min

Year-end reflection: My 2020 highlights

The last day of 2020 is finally here. To bring this decade to a close, I thought I would take a moment to share some of the highlights from this year in the form of pictures…
Dec 31, 2020
3 min

A paper that changed my life - The Bayesian LASSO

As tough as this year has been, it goes without saying that 2020 is a particularly good year to be thankful for science, which happens to be one of the many things that are…
Nov 25, 2020
3 min

Student paper awards and travel grants - A resource for students and early-career researchers in data science

Updated on October 4, 2026. The list has been rebuilt: every entry was checked against its official page, it has grown from 17 awards to 74, and there are now three ways to…
Oct 31, 2020
5 min

Celebrating milestones as a scientist

As scientists, we rarely celebrate milestones be it a certain number of citations we have received or a certain number of impactful papers/patents we have co-authored. This…
Sep 15, 2020
2 min

Early-career setback - A throwback to my first paper

Note: the figure above was regenerated on October 4, 2026. It now runs through 2025 and uses Google Scholar’s yearly citation counts as they are, self-citations included.…
Aug 20, 2020
3 min

A reflection on my first guest editorial experience

Recently, I had a chance to wrap up a special issue at the journal Frontiers in Genetics. This is my first-hand experience as a lead Guest Associate Editor.
Jul 30, 2020
2 min

Automatically update citation metrics in your CV with a bare minimum script - Part II

Updated on October 4, 2026. The Sweave steps now come with a small example you can run, there is a second route through Quarto that also puts a citation count next to each…
Mar 3, 2020
8 min

Automatically update citation metrics in your CV with a bare minimum script - Part I

Updated on October 4, 2026. The script can now be copied straight from this page, it falls back on saved numbers when Google Scholar does not answer, the links are…
Feb 16, 2020
8 min

Predicting the diverse metabolic activities of the microbiome

This is a repost backdated to match the original post that appeared in Nature Research Microbiology Community in July 2019. It represents the backstory behind the following…
Jul 17, 2019
1 min

Nontraditional Collaboration: A Success Story at JSM 2016

This is a repost backdated to match the original post that appeared in AMSTAT News in August 2018. I hope you enjoy reading it :)
Aug 1, 2018
1 min

And they lived happily ever after - a microbial fairy tale of DNA and RNA

This is a repost backdated to match the original post that appeared in Nature Research Microbiology Community in January 2018. In case you are wondering, this post is a…
Jan 15, 2018
1 min
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