William Weaver

Get to know me!

I am an Ecology and Evolutionary Biology PhD student at the University of Michigan working with Dr. Stephen A. Smith. My current project, LeafMachine, aims to automate much of the work required to obtain leaf trait data from herbarium specimen vouchers using convolutional neural networks, support vector machines, computer vision, and object detection algorithms. I study leaf-shape evolution in angiosperms. At the University of Colorado, Boulder I double majored in environmental studies and ecology and evolutionary biology. My time was split between Dr. Stacey D. Smith's laboratory, where I worked on community assembly and invasion projects, and the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) Center for Limnology, where I was an associate scientist studying water quality in streams and municipal reservoirs. In my free time, you can always find me in the mountains emulating John Muir