About Me
My name is Alexander Baxter, and I am psychology PhD candidate at the University of California, Davis. I will graduate in June 2023, and I am seeking a job as a researcher / data analyst in a government or industry setting. In total, I have over 7 years of experience working as an applied researcher (in both academic and government settings). I hope to find a position where I can use my skills as a data analyst to solve real-world problems and make a difference in my community. I am also passionate about diversity, equity, and inclusion, and as a member of the LGBTQ+ community, I am committed to upholding these principles in the workplace and in all other aspects of my life.
Please see below for my sample work portfolio.
Contact
Email: alexander.baxter94 [at] gmail [dot] com
Other Sites: LinkedIn · Google Scholar Page . Full List of Publications & Awards
Portfolio
Data Cleaning: Exploring Data Entry Errors (DOJ)
In this technical report, I explored potential data entry errors as part of my job at the California DOJ Research Center. I work with a team of four others to analyze a large dataset (3 million+ rows) for an annual report on racial profiling by police officers, under the direction of a board of subject-matter experts. The board wanted to analyze whether there were racial disparities in how police stops lasted. However, an initial analysis showed that a small subset of stops had an unusually long stop duration, which suggested that the data may have been incorrectly entered for some stops. My assignment was to investigate these cases. I identified four types of errors that could potentially explain these patterns in the data and proposed several solutions to reduce these errors in future waves of data collection.
Data Dashboard: Interactive Graphs in R Shiny App
This is an interactive data dashboard that I built using R Shiny for a research project that I recently submitted for publication. The study assessed whether a 11 different social factors were associated with vasopressin, a hormone associated with bonding and other types of social behaviors, across 14 different brain regions. I created this app to allow readers to explore the data themselves and visualize specific analyses of interest. The app also allows users to visualize the data's variability across subjects and brain regions.
Data Visualization: Predictors of Educational Achievement
This is a report that I wrote to demonstrate my ability to perform descriptive analyses and create summary data visualizations using R Markdown. The report explores factors associated with educational achievement in a public data set from the National Center for Education Statistics.
Meta-Analysis: Initial Impressions Predict Later Romantic Pursuit
In this first-authored study, I used three data sets (550+ participants) to assess whether first impressions during speed-dating predicted later romantic pursuit. I meta-analyzed the results across studies, and found that impressions based on compatibility and popularity were the strongest predictors of later dating. This project demonstrates my ability to communicate results to both technical audiences (in a journal article) and lay audiences (in press interviews).
PDF · PNAS Article · Data, R Code, & Preregistration . Newsweek Coverage · Altmetric: Top 5% Attention Score
Data Mining: Genome-Wide Analysis of Personality and Health
In this first-authored study, I explored whether infant personality measures were associated with biological markers of health and immunity (methylation in immune cells) across over 1 million sites in the genome. This project demonstrates my ability to identify key trends from large quantities of data and my ability to work with large data sets in R.
PDF . Journal Article .
Machine Learning, Data Reduction, & Model Fitting
This is a statistics lab that I wrote to teach students how to perform machine learning analyses via regularization (ridge and lasso regression). The lab uses a data set from scientific study on the social lives of people that identify as asexual, and demonstrates how machine learning can be used to identify the best predictors of an outcome (sexual identity) across many psychological and social predictors (10+). The lab also teaches students about the danger of overfitting a regression model with too many predictors, and demonstrates that regression analyses can be evaluated by testing the model in a hold out data set that was not used for training the original model.
Power Analysis via Simulation and Bootstrapping
This is a statistics lab that I wrote to teach students how to use bootstrapping and data simulation to plan studies (power analyses) and estimate population parameters (prevalance rates), even when limited information is available and must be compiled from different sources. The lab also teaches students how to apply these principles to estimate confidence intervals for data analysis.
Item Analysis and Survey Development
This is a group project that I did as part of a research methods and measurements course. The assignment was to create a 10-question survey to measure a psychological construct. We then had to administer the survey and analyze the resulting data to assess whether our measures had psychometric reliability and subscale reliability (determined via correlational analysis and factor analysis).
Oral & Poster Presentations: Compatibility and Relationships
In this 7 minute oral presentation, I present an overview and preliminary results on a psychology research project. The study investigated how initial compatibility between potential partners contributes to relationship formation, and found converging lines of evidence in both humans and monkeys.
This presentation was given at The Love Consortium 2021 Virtual Research Conference.
This is a poster that I designed and presented at an academic research conference (on the same project described above). This poster demonstrates my ability to create aesthetic and engaging presentations that effectively communicate research results.
This poster was presented at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology 2022 Research Confence.