Rafael Maia

Rafael Maia

I am a recovering academic making the exciting transition into Data Science. I am currently a Data Science fellow at Insight Data Science in the San Francisco Bay Area. My project uses Natural Language Processing to give recommendations of odd and overlooked travel destinations (scraped from Atlas Obscura) based on their textual similarity. Check out the app demo and the presentation slides!

Previously, I was a Junior Fellow of the Simons Society of Fellows in Dustin Rubenstein’s lab at Columbia University, after a quick stint in Luke Harmon’s lab at the University of Idaho and a PhD in Integrated Biosciences in Matthew Shawkey’s lab at The University of Akron.

As a biologist, I studied the production and evolution of animal coloration. Iridescent colors are among the brightest, most dazzling and diverse visual signals found in animals. My research focused on how the nanometer-level organization of structures responsible for producing these colors takes place during feather development, and how this template can be explored to expand the avian color palette and facilitate the diversification of sexually-selected ornaments.