Karthik Ram

Howdy, I’m Karthik

I’m a research scientist focused on global change biology, reproducible research, sustainable software, and open science. I’d love to connect with people interested in these areas, learn about collaboration opportunities, or just chat about Wes Anderson's design sense

Working at the interface of data science and global change

I’m a research scientist at UC Berkeley’s Institute for Data Science and The Initiative for Global Change Biology. My research is interdisciplinary and covers areas such as understanding impacts of climate change on ecological communities, reproducible research, sustainable scientific software, and open science. I am the co-founder and director of The rOpenSci Project and lead at URSSI. I currently serve on the board of Research Software Alliance and The Software Sustainability Institute. I graduated with a PhD in Ecology and Evolution from UC Davis and has since held postdoc positions at UC Santa Cruz and UC Berkeley.

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A few of my key projects

rOpenSci

rOpenSci

I work full-time on a collaborative project that aims to lower barriers to accessing scientific data and making research more reproducible.

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UC Berkeley's Berkeley Institute for Data Science

UC Berkeley

I'm currently a senior scientist at UC Berkeley's Berkeley Institute for Data Science.

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URSSI

URSSI

I am the lead PI behind an NSF funded effort called US Research Software Sustainability Institute.

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Research Software is critical for society to make progress in science, but much of it is developed and maintained unsustainably, making it hard to reuse and build upon existing work. Through my work at rOpenSci and URSSI, I strive to improve the state of scientific software and its impact on science.

I frequently speak about data science and research software in academia

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Latest talk

How to enable and sustain thriving Open Source Ecosystems (OSE)

Software impacts virtually all areas of research but has been a heavily undervalued contribution. Over the past decade alone, the research software landscape has changed dramatically. It is now substantially easier to start new software projects, …

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My work relies on using historic and modern ecological data with data science tools and methods to understand how systems respond to global change.

I occasionally blog about topics related to open science, ecology, and data visualization

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Latest post

Enabling culture change for meaningful data sharing

Nick Tierney and I have been working on a paper about data sharing from the perspective of computational reproducibility and the practicalities of reproducing published research or other analyses. Our original paper was substantially longer and took …

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