Come September 2021, Mauricio Vargas Sepúlveda, better known as Pachá, will be moving to Canada to start his Ph.D. in the U of T Department of Statistical Sciences (DoSS), under the co-supervision of Drs. Monica Alexander (DoSS and Sociology) and Rohan Alexander (DoSS and Faculty of Information). Together, they will work on Mdoc project Advancing data cleaning and preparation to enhance reproducible research and open science in quantitative analysis.
At present, Mauricio is completing his Master’s of Science in Statistics at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile where he’s working with Dr. Yoto V. Yotov on gravity models for better insights on current tariffs, non-tariff measures (NTMs), agreements, and bilateral trade flows, and building computational tools to identify key commodities to negotiate better tariffs.
His interests are reproducing results from books and scientific articles, as well as improving Free Open Source Software (FOSS). As a result of this, his contributions include different R packages such as gravity (econometrics), eflm (generalized linear models), lsts (time series), with a strong focus on efficient implementations and providing competitive alternatives to closed source software, in order to contribute to more open and reproducible research using shared data and reusable software.
CANSSI Ontario launched the Multidisciplinary Doctoral (Mdoc) Training Program in the DoSS in 2019. Students admitted to the Mdoc Program can be domestic or international and will receive the same funding package as the other doctoral students entering the DoSS including Teaching Assistant assignments. Learn more.