Michael Catchen

Michael is a Data Scientist/Research Software Engineer at the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center for Data Science and Environment, working on building open infrastructure and pipelines for bioacoustic monitoring. Specifically, he currently works on the Soundhub platform for managing and analyzing bioacoustic data, and modular tools for building bioacoustics pipelines in Jupyter.

Previously, Michael was an IVADO postdoctoral fellow at the Université de Montréal, where he worked on best practices for species distribution modeling with computer vision, and optimizing spatial sampling effort for mapping wildlife disease and zoonotic spillover risk. He grew up in Colorado, where he obtained his undergraduate and master’s degrees from the University of Colorado Boulder. He received his PhD from McGill University in Montréal under the supervision of Andy Gonzalez, where he worked on modeling and monitoring the biogeography of species interaction networks through simulation and machine learning. He has also previously worked on open infrastructure for biodiversity monitoring with GEO BON. He is also very interested in data visualization and interactive methods for scientific storytelling focused on user experience.