Hi, my name is James Kitchens, and I am a graduate student studying population genetics in the Coop Lab through the UC Davis Population Graduate Group. Before graduate school, I interned at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California, researching the application of remote sensing for groundwater observation and management. In December 2019, I graduated from Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina, where I earned a B.S. in Biology and B.S. in Chemistry. While in undergraduate, I worked in the Warren Wilson College Genetics and Plant Physiology Laboratory as a Research Assistant on projects focused around the conservation of human-impacted species in the United States.
Python
R
Shiny
HTML
CSS
JavaScript
Git
SQLite
QGIS
ArcGIS
GRASS GIS
DNA Extraction
PCR
Fragment Analysis
NMR
5. Deraje, P., Kitchens, J., Coop, G., & Osmond, M. M. (2025) The promise and challenge of spatial inference with the full ancestral recombination graph under Brownian motion. bioRxiv
4. Kitchens, J., & Coop, G. (2023) Visualizing the shared nature of human genetic variation. Zenodo
3. Whipple, A.L., C. Ray, et al. (2021) Temporal vs. spatial variation in stress-associated metabolites within a population of climate-sensitive small mammals. Conservation Physiology, Volume 9, Issue 1
2. Kim et al. (2021) An evaluation of remotely sensed and in-situ data sufficiency for SGMA-scale groundwater studies in the Central Valley, California. Journal of the American Water Resources Association, Volume 57, Issue 5
1. Webb et al. (2017) Molecular Genetic Influences on Normative and Problematic Alcohol Use in a Population-Based Sample of College Students. Frontiers in Genetics, Volume 8, Article 30
Upper Cherry Creek
May 31, 2025
Cherry Creek winds its way through the polished granite domes of Emigrant Wilderness, just northwest of Yosemite National Park. In late spring, clear blue snow melt water from the high peaks to the northeast is funneled through the canyon as it descends to Cherry Lake.
Hiking
Photography
Gerrymandering
May 28, 2024
In 2022 during a late night (couldn't sleep) coding exploration, I wrote a small maze generator script in R. I was interested in pathfinding algorithms and specifically whether certain nodes in a graph are more likely to be traversed through than others. It may not be obvious but a maze can be reinterpreted as a graph (or network).
Python
D3
Visualizing Human Genetic Diversity
May 16, 2023
A key insight from human genetics is that, as a species, we are all very genetically similar to one another and share much of our genetic variation. Our genome can be depicted as a string of letters (A, T, G, and C), referring to the four nucleobases found in DNA.
Genetics
D3
Python
R
kitchensjn@gmail.com