Hi! My name is Eric Smith, and I’m a PhD candidate in Physics at Princeton University. I’ve always been fascinated by cool, mathematical ways to understand the world around me – as a kid I told myself that when I grew up, I wanted to “put numbers on things that didn’t have numbers on them”. For my doctoral research, I’m satisfying that childhood urge by working in a biophysics lab to quantify levels of gene expression, in the hopes of understanding how cells in the fruit fly embryo learn their positions relative to their neighbors. With this website, I’d like to channel that same focus into exploring publicly available datasets. There’s a lot of open data out there, so this should be interesting!