Hi, I’m Paul.
A scientist and software developer.
My passions are agriculture, education, ecology, and technology. Currently, I’m excited about building AI tools and products for sustainable farming.
About Me
I’ve spent the past 8 years in school getting a B.S. in Biology with a minor in Chemistry, and a Ph.D. in Entomology (study of bugs). My goal for my academic research is to design farm management programs that helps farmers have healthier land, with higher profits, and lower reliance on external inputs.
Now a days, I spend a portion of my time working on software. I began teaching myself to code 3+ years ago and consider myself to be a full-stack software developer. It’s amazing what you can do do with a computer and internet connection.
Experience
Science Teacher Royal Valley High School 2023-current
Adjunct Faculty Heritage University 2020-current
Visiting Assistant Professor Zambian Institute of Agriculture 2022-current
Research Assistant Washington State University 2018-2022
Research Associate United States Department of Agriculture 2018-2023
Selected Research & Publications
Improving Conservation Biological Control in Washington Specialty Crops
This link will take you to my Ph.D. dissertation. Feel free to give it a read!
Identifying Farming Strategies Associated With Achieving Global Agricultural Sustainability
This project was trying to examine the globabl agricultural system to see if there were any trends in farming practices that may help us achieve global agricultural sustainability as laid out by the United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. The results suggests that countries that are actively promoting “organic” practices, or who had the highest production of “organic” agriculture also had made greater progress towards key Sustainable Development Goals.
Nontarget Impacts of Herbicides on Spiders in Orchards
This project studied how herbicides applied to the floor of tree fruit orchards has negative effects on beneficial predators, like spiders. Our work demonstrates that herbicides have limited lethal effects on spiders, but we did find significant sublethal effects. For some species and herbicides, the spiders that had been treated moved more frequently and ate more food than spiders that were not treated.
Not all predators are equal: miticide non-target effects and differential selectivity
This project studied how miticides, a type of pesticides, can have negative effects on beneficial predators of strawberry pests. Our work demonstrates that miticides have significant lethal and sublethal effects on the predators we were studying and that the effect of the pesticide depended on the species of predator that we were testing.
Example Computer Science Project
Neural Networks with Tensorflow
This project demonstrates my ability to implement recurrent neural networks in Python using Tensorflow.
Contact Me
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