Julian Schmitt

Julian Schmitt

Caltech PhD Candidate | Applied Math, Statistics & Climate | Nordic Skier

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Pages

Posts

NSF Research Proposal

less than 1 minute read

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I was awarded a 2023 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship to fund my graduate studies. My research proposal combined my interests in drought, snow, and seismology. NSF GRFP Research Proposal.

Gap Semester

less than 1 minute read

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I am taking Fall 2022 off from school to graduate on-cycle this spring. Current activities include thesis research, drafting a manuscript for the snow droughts study, exploring Vermont on foot, bike, and skis, and visiting friends.

Weston Ski Track Snowmaking Project

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This past spring, I was lucky enough to work on a mini project for Jim Stock alongside my friend James Kitch exploring how climate change was likely to impact our local Nordic ski center, the Weston Ski Track. As snowfall is inconsistent in the Boston area, the center relies on snowmaking equipment that uses high-pressure cannons to throw a compressed air and water mixture into the sky where it freezes as snow (if you’ve ever skied on manmade snow you know it’s not quite the same). Snowmaking equipment requires certain conditions to run, for example, it has to be cold enough to freeze water in the air but not too cold such that the snowmaking pipes freeze. The amount of moisture in the air places further constraints on when snow can be made and wind speed constraints on snowmaking equipment also warrant consideration. The project’s goal was to show that even with future climate projections, there would still be enough snowmaking hours to make Boston area skiing possible. These results helped lobby for additional funding to expand the snowmaking capacity at Weston.

Bozeman Adventures

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Adventures in Bozeman, MT

To avoid another semester stuck on zoom in a dorm room, my teammate James Kitch and I decided to take a gap ski-mester. We drove out to Bozeman, MT where we’d rented a small apartment outside of town. During the winter we trained and raced with the Bridger Ski Foundation ski team coached by Heather Mooney and former 4x Olympian Andy Newell. Over the summer we explored seemingly limitless mountain running trails, National Parks, and hosted an impressive rotation of friends on the second twin bed. In addition to exploring some of the West’s best skiing, we learned how to fix a lot of things on a car, not cook broccoli until the pot turns black, and how to take shoot epic (at least from our point of view) videos of ourselves on a GoPro. We ended up making a few highlight blog videos - they’re pretty fun :)

Harvard Varsity Nordic Ski Team

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Background

Since my sophomore year, I’ve trained and competed with the Harvard Varsity Nordic ski team (cross-country skiing). I walked onto the team after wanting a change from the clubs and club sports teams I participated in during my freshman year. Racing and training at the collegiate level have been incredibly rewarding and I’ve made some of my closest friends. My top finish to date is a 35th place finish in a mass start skate 20k. I am looking forward to one final 2023 race season!

portfolio

publications

January 01, 1900

Small area estimation of forest biomass via a two-stage model for continuous zero-inflated data

June 04, 2024

Building and Evaluating a two-part mixed-effects model for forestry data in a zero-inflated setting.

Recommended citation: White, Grayson W., Josh K. Yamamoto, Dinan H. Elsyad, Julian F. Schmitt, Niels H. Korsgaard, Jie Kate Hu, George C. Gaines III, Tracey S. Frescino, and Kelly S. McConville. "Small area estimation of forest biomass via a two-stage model for continuous zero-inflated data." arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.03263 (2024). https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.03263

talks

Cloud Computing for Seismology

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Co-presented a tutorial on using commercial cloud computing services for seismology applications with PI Marine Denolle and Tim Clements to the Stanford Seismology Group led by Professor Beroza. I provided a technical workflow example using the Julia programming language on AWS with step-by-step instructions for getting started with AWS: from selecting instance configurations and getting key pairs set up to create an Amazon machine image built with Julia packages.

Comprehensive California-wide large-scale noise cross correlations

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At AGU 2020, I outlined the high-performance computing framework developed during my time with the Harvard Seismology Group. The project, entitled: C4: Comprehensive California Cross-Correlations, was presented during session 022 (Seismology). Below is a preview video I made as the extended version of my oral talk.

Results from the Summer 2022 Undergraduate Forestry Data Science Program

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Product demonstration of an RShiny website we developed as part of the Harvard Undergraduate Forestry Data Science program in collaboration with our stakeholder NCASI. Here we combine CMIP5 and CMIP6 large ensemble climate data with forestry data to model how changes in climate are expected to impact tree species distributions. We particularly focus on user experience and interactivity alongside developing graphics that contain measures of uncertainty while still being accessible to an audience with a wide range of statistical acumen.

teaching

Teaching experience 1

Undergraduate course, University 1, Department, 2014

This is a description of a teaching experience. You can use markdown like any other post.

Teaching experience 2

Workshop, University 1, Department, 2015

This is a description of a teaching experience. You can use markdown like any other post.