Karthik Ram
Head Of Science at Stealth Startup
Berkeley, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolKarthik Ram is a data science and research leader with 14 years of experience bridging academic research and applied open-science initiatives, currently serving as Head of Science at Valency Systems and Research Associate Professor at UC Berkeley. Trained as a PhD ecologist, he translates complex scientific problems into reproducible data tools and policies, having led roles from postdoc to senior research data scientist. A co-founder of rOpenSci and long-time contributor to community projects like the Journal of Open Source Software, he combines technical authorship, content strategy, and package development (including curated R color palettes with unit tests) to improve research software usability. Active on advisory boards and program-level open science efforts, he is as comfortable shaping strategic directions as he is shipping tested code and documentation. An unexpected throughline in his work is a focus on the user experience of research workflows—making science more accessible, sustainable, and reproducible.
14 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at University of California, Davis
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (14)
r10
academia10
open-access10
publish10
journal10
content-management9
data-visualisation9
data-visualization9
markdown-it9
data-visualizations9
markdown9
content-management-system9
data-analysis8
testing7
Programming languages (23)
Github contributions (5)
karthik/wesanderson
Mar 2014 - Feb 2022
A Wes Anderson color palette for R
Role in this project:
Data Scientist
Data ScientistContributions:2 releases, 96 commits, 13 PRs in 8 years
Contributions summary:Karthik primarily contributed to the creation of color palettes based on Wes Anderson movies. They added new color palettes, updated existing ones, and reorganized the palette structure for better organization by movie. The user also incorporated unit tests to ensure the palettes functioned correctly. Moreover, they updated documentation and fixed descriptions.
plotpalettedata-visualizationandersonwes
openjournals/joss
Feb 2016 - Jul 2020
The Journal of Open Source Software
Role in this project:Technical Writer / Content Strategist
Technical Writer / Content StrategistContributions:7 commits, 3 PRs, 33 comments in 4 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Karthik primarily contributed to the documentation and content of the JOSS journal. Their commits involved editing the "about" page, updating author guidelines, and adding a reviewer signup form. These changes included updating the bio of an editor with links, clarifying journal policies, and creating a form linked to an external service. This indicates a focus on refining the journal's information and improving the user experience for authors and reviewers.
publishingopen-accessjournalscientific-softwarescientific-journals
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.