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
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
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
Flexbox Solves All
May 24, 2022
I really like when I get to see clear progress in my programming abilities. When I first created this website, I had relatively little experience with website design, so I was drawing a lot of code and inspiration from YouTube tutorials and Stack Overflow. There are a few aspects of the website that I would categorize as "good enough", falling so perfectly at the intersection of annoyance and complacency that they will likely never be updated. But there was one particular issue that has always bothered me... the blog post thumbnail images.
HTML
CSS
kitchensjn@gmail.com