Mel Moreno began her six-week internship in Mathieu Basille’s lab in May 2017. As a Miami native, she was familiar with Davie, and thrilled to return to South Florida for the summer. Mel Moreno was an ideal candidate for this internship, because of her interest with R, and spatial ecology. Mel had taken Quantitative Ecology (WIS 4601) in Fall 2016, and realized she had a real knack for R data analysis. Her internship culminated in the publication of a 3-part series on the r-spatial blog about “Drawing beautiful maps programmatically with R, sf and ggplot2” (Part 1: Basics; Part 2: Layers; Part 3: Layouts).
Mel’s New Career
Mel has started her new full-time position at the University of Florida CTS-IT Department. Her role in this position is to manage a team of developers to produce products for human clinical studies. Her team manages data products helping the researchers interpret their results so that may publish their findings. Mel is enjoying not being in school but may return for a B.S. in computer science in 2022.
M.S. Graduation Summer 2021
Mel has recently graduated student from the University of Florida in Gainesville, FL. She graduated in Summer 2021 with a M.S. in Interdisciplinary Science. During her masters career, she was able to obtain a Teaching Data Carpentries certificate. She is currently working on publishing her master’s thesis.
Mel worked under Dr. Bill Pine on the Lone Cabbage Reef Oyster Restoration Project. She was assisting on creating visualizations and maps for data collected from Cedar Key, FL, including water quality, and oyster counts and heights. Some of the project aspects she manages include data management, storage, and reconciliation.
Oyster Quadrat in Cedar Key, FL
Mel’s graduate thesis involves documenting how these biological oyster and water quality data are managed. Another aspect of her graduate thesis is a geospatial analysis of a specific shoreline in Cedar Key, FL.
B.S. Graduation Fall 2017
Graduation Fall 2017
Mel previously graduated from the University of Florida in Fall 2017 with a B.S. in Wildlife Ecology and Conservation. During her undergraduate career, she was selected by the Florida Chapter of the Wildlife Society to attend the 2017 Conclave Conference at Mississippi State University.
Mississippi State Conclave Conference
Mel also was awarded the Minorities in Natural Resource Conservation (MINRC) stipend to attend the SEAFWAS Conference in Fall 2016. There she was awarded the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Award, for best essay on how growing up as a minority has given her a different perspective on conservation.
SEAFWAS, Baton Rouge, LA
Miscellaneous
See her interview “How WEC Works”!