About Me

I completed my PhD in Cognition and Neuroscience at The University of Texas at Dallas in 2024. My research was on multivariate statistics and their applications to data in cognition and neuroscience, though these methods are multidisciplinary. I enjoy data manipulation, modeling, and visualization, and I am happy to be utilizing those skills as a data scientist, currently with The Hartford. My language of choice for data science is of course Python, but I have extensive R experience from my PhD research and can implement solutions in C++ as well. I feel my main strength is learning new skills quickly, so I am always up for a new challenge. More about my professional experience and skills can be found on my LinkedIn.

How I got here

I grew up primarily in McKinney, TX. I was a theater kid and Eagle Scout, and I excelled at my classes all through K-12¹. My favorite topics were science (e.g., biology, chemistry, psychology) and math, and in my senior year of high school I took AP Computer Science and loved it.

Baylor

I went to Baylor University where I studied neuroscience, with minors in computer science and mathematics. I was a research assistant in the Sekeres Memory Lab, where I worked on data collection and analysis for behavioral experiments with mice. In my computer science courses, I learned to solve problems using C++. Along my way to graduating summa cum laude, I also had a lot of cool experiences:

• I mentored incoming first-year and prospective students as a “Student Ambassador” for the Psychology and Neuroscience department.
• I worked at the Baylor Marina, where I got paid to kayak, paddleboard, and teach sailboat classes on a sandy beach.
• I learned Italian and studied abroad for 6 weeks in Florence.
• I ran the Bearathon — “The Toughest Half Marathon in Texas”.

But alas, at some point it was time to go.

Met my incredible wife, Amanda, along the way too!

UT Dallas

In 2019, I arrived in Richardson, Texas to start my PhD in Cognition and Neuroscience with Dr. Hervé Abdi. I wanted to apply my math and computer science skills to data in the biosciences, and Dr. Abdi’s lab was the perfect fit.

In my first two years in the program, I learned my love for statistics, data analysis, and R. For my first year project, I created a new multivariate method called PLSMFA and wrote an R package to implement it. After that, I finished my second year project, a literature review about permutation tests for multivariate methods, and this review led to my dissertation. For the dissertation, I ran a large simulation study to assess the Type I error and power of several permutation methods for selecting components in two-table multivariate methods (such as partial least squares correlation).

Throughout the program, I also worked on collaborative projects where I analyzed and visualized data to answer questions about autism, occupational skills, and decision making, to name a few topics. Additionally, I was a teaching assistant for Dr. Abdi’s advanced multivariate statistics and programming in R classes. I’m very excited to be joining the data science field so that I can continue to contribute value to organizations through my love of all things data.

Personal interests

I love to learn, so I have a habit of becoming obsessed with a new topic and diving deep into it to soak up as much as I can. They don’t all become passions or hobbies, but some stick around long-term. Things that I am always down to chat about include, but are not limited to, distance running, the great outdoors, vegan cooking, astronomy, homebrewing, and whichever quirky Wikipedia article you just read.

1. Narrator: “Luke was a nerd in high school, and happy with it.” ↩