About me

I’m Grayson, a doctoral student in the Finley Lab at Michigan State University working on a Ph.D. in Forestry and M.S. in Statistics. Prior to attending Michigan State, I worked as a Data Scientist contracting with the USDA Forest Service where I primarily worked on the development and public release of the FIESTA R package. Prior to that, I received a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics with a concentration in statistics at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.

My research interests are in small area estimation, hierarchical Bayesian modeling, applications of statistical methods to forestry and natural resources problems, teaching data science and statistics, and statistical software development. A list of my publications and other scholarly activity is available here. I also enjoy writing, maintaining, and contributing to statistical software. A few of my favorite pieces of statistical software that I have worked on are FIESTA (co-author, maintainer), for estimation and analysis of forest inventory data, and gglm (author, maintainer), for easily making diagnostic plots for linear models using ggplot2.

Outside of research I enjoy exploring new places with my dog, Dude, camping, cycling, and trying my best to perfect my home espresso skills and technique.