I'm a computational plant biologist with a background in biochemistry, pursuing my PhD at Michigan State University (MSU) co-advised by Drs. Bob VanBuren and Mohammad Ghassemi. I work on applying natural language processing techniques to answer biological questions in the plant science domain. For more details on active projects, feel free to browse my repositories or view my website.
I care about writing reproducible, well-documented code for biology, and am always looking for feedback on my code and documentation. If you're using code from one of my repositories and have any questions or feedback, please open an issue or email me at lotrecks@msu.edu!
I love science communication, and have written a guest blog for MSU SciComm and have been interviewed for their podcast. I also enjoy giving talks on topics like applications of machine learning in plant biology and my own research.
I'm also a founding member and past president of QT-Grad, an organization for queer and trans graduate students at MSU, and helped found & run the peer mentorship program in my home department.
Fun fact: In my undergrad, I was a rock climbing instructor at the Lindseth Climbing Center, where I taught people how to top rope and lead climb!