Instructors

The course will be taught by:

Eric J Pedersen

Eric Pedersen is a postdoctoral researcher in the Center for Limnology, at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. He works on statistical and theoretical models of movement and community dynamics, and has been using R for his work for almost 10 years. He’s currently pretending to be a fisheries ecologist, but has worked with everything from forest recruitment patterns to marine larval dispersal to human movement. He uses mgcv to model nonlinear functional relationships, complex spatio-temporal patterns, and test mechanistic models.

Gavin L Simpson

Gavin is a research scientist at the Institute of Environmental Change and Society, University Regina, Canada. He started using R (just) before version 1.0 was released and maintains several R packages as well as contributing to and helping to maintain the popular vegan package. A (palaeo)limnologist and (palaeo)ecologist by training, Gavin is particularly interested in community dynamics in time (OK, and space) and as such invariably finds himself fitting non-linear models to stubbornly-complicated time series data with mgcv.

David L Miller

Dave is a scientific programmer at Integrated Statistics in Woods Hole, MA and an honourary fellow of the University of St Andrews, Scotland. Having completed his PhD with Simon Wood in 2012, he’s spent a lot of time thinking about how to model the spatial distribution of animal populations, most recently North Atlantic right whales. mgcv is his go to tool for building complex spatial models.