Ed Baskerville

Background

About Ed Baskerville

I'm a computational modeler and software developer looking for a job in one of the many areas I care about, including climate and clean energy, public health, politics, or personal software built as a public good.I have formal training in computer science and software engineering, complex systems simulation, and probabilistic and statistical modeling, including Bayesian methods and machine learning.I started with a stint at Apple during college, got a Ph.D in ecology studying the structure and dynamics of food webs, and have spent my professional time consulting on disease modeling projects ranging from antibody evolution to causality detection in epidemic time series.My scientific software toolkit has included Julia, Python, R, SQL, Stan, C, C++, and Rust. I have also experimented with database-driven backends in Python, web frontends in React, Elm, and d3, and Apple platform apps in Objective-C and Swift.I'm looking for a new job in public health or in another area I care about, particularly (1) climate and clean energy;(2) politics; or (3) personal software built as a public good.(1) Climate and Clean EnergyI am more inspired every day by the work people are doing to mitigate the global climate threat. Whether it's to better model the changing climate, to better control energy flow in a heat battery, or to better manage an increasingly decentralized, complex and interconnected electrical grid, I have relevant skills as a computational modeler and software developer and a strong desire to learn.(2) PoliticsWe live in a dangerous time for democracy, both in the United States and abroad. I am open to jobs that can keep us from the precipice and restore progress toward a more trusting, democratic society. My experience in this area includes (a) intense concern;(b) door-knocking and phone-banking; and (c) a donation website, TakeCongress.org, that raised over for many candidates in competitive national races by automatically allocating larger donations to closer races.(3) Personal software built as a public goodThe world needs real alternatives to cloud platforms for personal software, from document collaboration to social media to software development by non-experts. This software should be built as a public good, should store data under the user's ultimate control, e.g. via "local-first" approaches, and be run by well-governed non-profits.To explore these ideas, I have been building prototypes in Rust. I am very interested in working on a project aligned with this vision that has a plan to become viable and sustainable.