Hi, my name is James Kitchens, and I am a second year 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. (2024) Inferring the geographic history of recombinant lineages using the full ancestral recombination graph". 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
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
Why Are There So Many Gene Trees?
September 13, 2022
In evolutionary biology, we often think about the phylogeny of a group, the underlying relationships between the samples. When the comparison is of species (particularly those that are distantly related), it is common for these relationships to be relatively well-defined, allowing researchers to represent the shared history as a single phylogenetic tree of life.
Genetics
R
kitchensjn@gmail.com