Ph.D. Candidate in Biological Sciences and AI Researcher

Caleb C.

Hi, my name is Caleb Charpentier, and I am a PhD Candidate in Biological Sciences at Virginia Tech.
I completed my BS in Biology at Southeastern Louisiana University in 2022, with a minor in Computer Science. My current research involves developing AI tools that can improve the way we understand the evolution of morphological traits over macroevolutionary time.

In the past, I've privately tutored over 100 students from the elementary school to graduate school levels. Additionally, I've taught over 150 students in Intro Bio labs at Virginia Tech, and have mentored undergraduates who worked with my lab in the past.

My programming experience is mostly in R and Python. I am the primary developer on the R package Revticulate, which integrates R with the Bayesian phylogenetics program RevBayes, and am also a contributor to the RPhenoscate package, which uses organismal trait ontologies to improve the nuance and predictive abilities of certain phylogenetic comparative methods.

For Python, I am the primary developer of TraitBlender (a pipeline for simulating museum-specimen style images of synthetic organisms to assess computer vision tools), and have contributed to an ecology and evolution oriented deep learning package called BioEncoder and the bioinformatics pipeline SISRS.

I mostly tutor for programming and biology. These subjects can often be very overwhelming for people who are new to them, as they most require not only lots of memorization but also understand how complex systems work and interact with each other. As a tutor, my goal is to make these complex ideas simple, but breaking them down in smaller components can that are easier for students to understand and apply themselves.

If you have any questions or would like to schedule a session, feel free to reach out!