Carl A. B. Pearson, Lead Instructor

Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Florida, @pearsonca

Carl works at the Emerging Pathogens Institute on two primary veins of research, detecting covert social groups, and seasonal aspects of infectious disease ecology.

He is also a Naval Reservist supporting the Office of Naval Research, primarily as the architect and developer for the ONR-RC personnel management software, Edison.

Dane A. Brown, Instructor

Professor of the Practice, United States Naval Academy, @jamrootz

Dane teaches Electrical Engineering and Cybersecurity courses at the Naval Academy. He is passionate about STEM education and making it available as widely as possible. This is his second time teaching the STDIO Ghana course and he is excited about the growing support for the project.

Deanne B. McPherson, Instructor

PhD Candidate, Pennsylvania State University, @dbmcpherson

Deanne is a PhD candidate in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at Penn State University.

Her research focuses on big data analysis with social networks. She also works as a graduate researcher at the Applied Research Laboratory with emphasis on long range shipyard capacity planning.

Prior to returning to school, she spent 11 years as an active duty US Naval Officer and now currently serves as a reserve officer supporting the Office of Naval Research.

Jonathon K. Parker, Instructor

Computer Scientist, iBASEt, @arkerpay

Has over a decade of experience as a software engineer and computer scientist and received a Ph. D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of South Florida. Major interests are machine learning and natural language processing. Enjoys writing own code and proficient in Java, C, C#, Python and SQL/TSQL. Not a fan of U/I, but will work in JavaScript, HTML and CSS if required.

Earlier in life was an Active Duty Officer in the United States Navy.

Seifu Chonde, Instructor

Doctoral Fellow, Penn State University, @chondes

Seifu works for the Laboratory for Intelligent Systems Analytics. His research interests are in cheminformatics and analytics. He enjoys developing expert systems using R, Python, and d3.js for a number of applications. He previously taught courses in chemical engineering, chemistry, information technology, and (most recently) analytics both in the United States and in Africa.

Tom J. Hladish, Curriculum Development, Past Instructor

Post-doctoral Researcher, University of Florida, @tjhladish

Tom is interested in developing computational solutions to practical problems. Recently, his work has focused on dengue, a mosquito-spread disease endemic in tropical regions and emerging in temperate countries, in an effort to understand its epidemic dynamics and how we should best use interventions that are only partially effective. Other interests include the role of complex social structure on epidemic dynamics, inferring immunodynamics from epidemic time series, and Bayesian parameterization of stochastic models. Tom received his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin, where he studied these in the context of influenza and network modeling.