Leading expeditions to the tropics

I organized a scientific expedition to Mexico in 2019. My team of 7 people and I were in the search of very elusive species of spiders new to science over the course of a month. The size of the event made necesary the collaboration across Universities, and gave us the opportunity to bring science to marginalized communities in the highlands of Mexico. We advertised our expedition in collaboration with the Beaty Museum at the University of British Columbia.

Our collaboration with the museum brought the opportunity of making a new board game we called Taxonomy. Taxonomy is based on navigating maps while trying to flip tokens (representing spiders) by rolling a dice.

The illustrations were made using Adobe Illustrator, and the maps, height maps and textures generated with the TerrainTools Add-On in Photoshop CC-2020. Two versions of the game were created. The first one was taken with us during the expeditions, whereas the second one is currently deposited in the interactive room of the Beaty Museum at the University of British Columbia.

PYOINV 1.0

Arthropod faunistic inventories have always been a challenge to curate and maintain due to the elevated number of specimens and species that are collected. If each species is photographed, each standardized image expands the amount of information to process by an entire inventory. PYOINV is a simple yet powerful python version of Dr. Padilla's BIOINV software. Running on pandas and numpy, the library takes an excel table containing metadata and builds a custom HTML with images, taxonomic and inventory information of the specimen and species collected.

To use PYOINV it's necesary to have python installed. You can find more information in the official github (opens new tab) repository and the official page of the creator of the software BIOINV Dr. Fernando Alvarez Padilla.

INVENTORIES

A very important step in developing an interest in biodiversity is to be able to appreciate the complexity and beauty of the animals and plants that live near us. Some of our most resent work has focused on unveiling the diversity of Canada's West and East coast, using standardized protocols like the ones shown above, and specialized naturalist websites like iNaturalist.

Our observations using microscopy have contributed to the understanding of marine and terrestrial arthropods. Some rare species, like the parasitic sea lice Caligus clemensi were described in the last 20 years.

Many of the photos and links to iNaturalist for the species identified are part of a more inclusive iNaturalist project on the diversity of Keats Island. Likewise, some videos and images have been used to build the section Small Worlds of the Keats Island Conservation Society's Website.

EDUCATION

Along with Educational Resources, I have participated and coordinated multiple events and partnership programs to brind STEM to classrooms in the Vancouver School District under volunteer positions as part of Lets Talk Science (LTS) and UBC.

LTS Partnership program is based on the matching of a researcher with a classroom from the Vancouver School District, delivering and preparing lessons that focus on teaching the students about Science throughout the year, and divided in between 5 and 6 lessons.

In 2018, I served as a coordinator for the LTS Girls Coding Club, hosted at Hastings St., Vancouver, and the UBC Learning Exchange Centre, as a response to the lower representation of women in engineering and computer engineering careers. This course ran over 6 weeks, in collaboration with 5 volunteers, and was aimed at teaching programming skills in Python to girls from grades 5 to 7. Our team and I developed and delivered a curriculum based on python turtles and Trinket.

I participated in multiple events in partnership with Lets Talk Science, including a Video Game Colloquium, aimed at students in Highschool with the goal of advertising programming as an important skill. I was part of the organization committee, where I helped with the creation of a Design Document to advertise the fictional video game:

During my time as a Teaching Assistant at the University of British Columbia, I engaged my students with detailed videos explaining complex concepts in Biology and Genetics, for the courses BIOL234 (Fundamentals of Genetics) and BIOL233 (Genetics For Life).