Dan Kerchner 👋

I am a senior software developer and librarian with George Washington University Libraries and Academic Innovation - you can see more of my work at the linked Github organization. As part of my role, I develop software for institutional repositories and other special projects, in Python, Ruby/Rails, R, Javascript, and whatever else is needed. I also create and teach a variety of "coding for data science" workshops oriented towards beginning researchers in any discipline who want to learn to code in order to analyze, and visualize data, in both R and Python. I am a certified instructor with The Carpentries and use Carpentries teaching best practices both in self-created workshops for GW and when I teach Carpentries workshops at GW and other institutions.

I enjoy collaborating with other researchers on scholarly publications. You can see my list of publications at my ORCID page and also on Google Scholar

Speaking of coding and publishing, I am an advocate for open and reproducible research and I look for opportunities to think together with others about ways to make research code and data more open and reproducible (using Github is just the beginning!). I'm excited by some of the techniques I've learned recently, including use of Docker containers for research, environment management tools (such as renv, pip/conda, etc.), and I'm still learning. Next on my list is to learn how to create packages in R and Python as yet another best practice in open, reproducible research. I'm also excited to see that peer review of packages (for example, see rOpenSci ) is becoming more mainstream, and more a part of open science.

As one of the favorite parts of my role with GW Libraries and Academic Innovation, I also provide 1-on-1 consultations to researchers in the GW community, whether they are graduate students, faculty, staff, undergraduates, postdocs, or visiting scholars, who are seeking help with their research code. I provide a lot of help with R, but I and my teammates also help GW researchers with Python and any other coding-related topics they might need. I feel that this type of mentoring - and having a place to ask when you're stuck on code or don't know where to start - can really be the key to student success.

I am also a PhD student at GW, in the Milken Institute School of Public Health, with an MS (2024) in, and now working on a PhD in Health & Biomedical Data Science, Applied Bioinformatics. In addition to taking some very challenging and interesting coursework, I've also been contributing to projects and tools as a member of the GW Computational Biology Institute.