David Bapst, an Assistant Instructional Professor in the Geology & Geophysics department at Texas A&M University, is newly promoted to core faculty membership in the Ecology & Evolutionary Biology program. His research delves into the intersection of phylogenetics and the fossil record, with a particular focus on marine invertebrates and using quantitative paleobiology to uncover macroevolutionary patterns.
David’s passion for paleontology was ignited during his college years when he discovered the power of data analysis in understanding evolution and ecology. “I really enjoyed pulling at the threads of what seems to be a tightly-stitched theory, and using data from the fossil record to answer how evolution works on long time-scales,” he reflects.
David’s favorite aspect of his position, especially in graduate-level EEB elective courses like GEOL 670 and GEOL 651, is fostering analytical thinking in graduate students, and equipping them with statistical and data exploration tools. “The greatest part of my job is teaching others how to think critically about their data and the questions they are trying to answer, and how to pick out methods to move forward,” he says. David appreciates the diverse interests of students who take his courses, from EEB and other affiliated programs, as the diversity of research projects help expose students to explaining their work to very different fields, as well as drawing methodological connections between work even when the questions and data are nothing alike.
Since 2022, David has organized the workshop program for the Open Source for Open Science event run by the EEB program, helping the university community sample the experience of learning R and other languages. Over just the course of a weekend, OSOS organizers and instructors get to see many members of the community develop from not knowing how to program at all, to gaining self-confidence in their own skills. David is also the author of a widely-cited and extensively downloaded R package, paleotree, another way he tries to provide his expertise to the broader community.
Outside academia, David enjoys hiking, board games, roleplaying games, and catching all of the Pokemon.
