USU Ecologist Receives Moore Foundation Data Science Grant

Utah State University macroecologist Ethan White is one of 14 scientists selected nationally as a Moore Investigator in Data-Driven Discovery. Funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the award is part of a new $60 million, five-year initiative, one of the largest privately funded data science programs of its kind, committed to stimulating discoveries by supporting interdisciplinary, data-driven researchers.

“I’m very excited and humbled to receive this award,” says White, associate professor in USU’s Department of Biology and the USU Ecology Center. “The grant gives me the opportunity to study interesting, interdisciplinary problems and work toward answering important ecological questions.”

White was chosen from some 1,100 applicants for the grant, which provides him $1.5 million in research funding.

“My fellow grant recipients represent many different scientific disciplines, ranging from astrophysics to visualization science,” he says. “I’m especially excited to see two of the recipients are pursuing ecological questions.”

White, a 2010 recipient of a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award, says the field of ecology needs advanced data science expertise.

“As ecologists, we now have access to unprecedented amounts of data,” he says. “In fact, we’re dealing with datasets we can no longer easily transfer over the Internet. In some cases, data has to be physically shipped on hard drives.”

Large governmental efforts, such as NSF-funded NEON — the National Ecological Observatory Network — an initiative guided in part by USU ecologist Jim MacMahon, White notes, are providing scientists with minute-by-minute observations from a sophisticated, widespread network of sensors. Citizen science efforts, prompted by NEON and a host of other national, regional and local initiatives, are also boosting data collection.

“These are exciting times for ecological research, as studying ecology at large scales will enable us to investigate how biological systems are responding to global scale changes in climate and habitat,” he says.

White will pursue research with his award at the University of Florida, where he accepted an appointment as an associate professor in the university’s Department of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation and as a founding member of UF’s newly forming Informatics Institute. He leaves USU in May 2015.

“I’m grateful to Utah State, which provides a very supportive environment for young faculty,” he says. “I’ve always felt the university had my best interests at heart and provided me with a lot of freedom to pursue teaching and research in my chosen area of computational work.”

“The Moore Foundation award is outstanding and well-deserved recognition for Ethan’s forward-thinking approach to data-driven research,” says Lisa Berreau, interim dean for USU’s College of Science. “He’s to be commended not only for his innovative research, but for his willingness to share these tools and his expertise with students and colleagues.”

At USU, White has led popular “Software Carpentry” workshops to teach students and colleagues core computational skills.

“This is part of an international effort that has recently led to the formation of the non-profit Software Carpentry Foundation and a new sister project called Data Carpentry,” he says. “The focus of Data Carpentry is on helping scientists gain skills to grapple with large amounts of data.”

With former USU biology student Ben Morris ’12, a data platform engineer in California’s Silicon Valley, White developed an online tool called the EcoData Retriever, to automate finding, downloading, using and storing ecological data files.

“Open source tools to automate complicated and cumbersome database tasks allow ecologists to more rapidly explore important ecological questions at global scales,” White says. “Using technology in this manner unlocks the data logjam and allows the field of ecology to advance with greater speed and efficiency.”

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