I'm Hannah, a doctoral researcher in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology (EEB) at Rice University with plans to graduate in May 2026 at the earliest. My research addresses the ecological roles and implications of seasonality (ex: phenologies 🌸🪺🍂) and day-night cycles (ex: diel activities 💤🦇) under environmental change.

Much of my interest in this focus area grew from the accumulation of outdoor experiences noticing how life percieves and responds to the passage of time, as well as from my prior research experiences investigating hormone mechanisms regulating how organisms interpret temporal information in their environments. My work generally involves wet lab + computational approaches that loosely draw from undergraduate training in computer science. I am extremely grateful that my research is supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship--my research journey quite literally would not have been possible without it and without the support of my mentors (you know who you are).

✨ Skillset to share

• 💡 Ability to translate mechanistic, scientific concepts in biodiversity functioning, from individual physiology to ecosystem level, into quantitative models applicable to conservation decision-making
• 🔎 PhD-level expertise on the shifts in seasonal and daily ecological activity as a basis for tracking (and potentially mitigating) consequences of climate change and human disturbance on biodiversity
• 📉 Ecological network analysis, survival analysis, ordination techniques, hyperparameter selection, cross-validation, linear/nonlinear regression in hypothesis testing, compartmental epidemiological models
• 👯 Best practices in creating and advising on sustainability initiatives involving students and staff leadership at universities
• 🔧 Establishing low-stakes settings to fail early for long-term success
• 🌱 Dabbled in via 2-4 month long projects: bioacoustics monitoring equipment (intern at Wildlife Acoustics), genome assembly and analysis tools (data science capstone project), hydrogen as an alternative energy source for transportation (intern at Shell)
• 💬 Ask me about navigating the messy biodiversity and ecological data ecosystem
  
  

📫 I can be reached at hannah [dot] yin [at] rice [dot] edu (at least before I graduate).