One R Command Reproduces My Entire Dissertation Analysis
How `targets` turned my full dissertation analysis workflow into a single R command — a companion to Russ Poldrack's posts on workflow engines and Snakemake.
June 3, 20267 min read
Hi, I'm Shawn Schwartz, PhD
Senior data scientist & engineer at Slack. Psychology PhD from Stanford. I build open-source research tools, productivity software, and write about data, cognitive neuroscience, and building things.
What I've Built
Apps & Packages
Houston
macOSExpose 120+ hidden macOS settings and save them as reusable one-click setup profiles.
Carbon
iOS · WebMinimalist task manager built around three cards — Today, Next, and Someday.
clementime
macOSReimagines oral exam scheduling, turning a complex admin task into a simple workflow.
cassh
macOSAutomates SSH key rotation and certificate management for GitHub.
eyeris
R packageFlexible, reproducible pupillometry preprocessing framework for eye-tracking research.
charisma
R packageClassifies colors in biological images for reproducible evolutionary and comparative studies.
fMRIPrep Workbench
CLIEnd-to-end fMRI preprocessing pipeline from scanner acquisition to fMRIPrep execution.
TinyVault
Self-hostedDIY client-side encryption for Google Workspace, self-hosted for ~$0.10/month.
Recent Peer-Reviewed Research PapersView all
Featured article
charisma: An R package to perform reproducible colour characterization of digital images for biological studies
Shawn T. Schwartz, Whitney L. E. Tsai, Elizabeth A. Karan, Mark S. Juhn, Allison J. Shultz, John E. McCormack, Thomas B. Smith, Michael E. Alfaro
Introduces charisma, an R package for high-throughput pixel-level colour classification of biological images, validated against expert assessments and applied to tanager colour evolution, enabling standardized and reproducible large-scale colour analysis workflows.
April 27, 2026
Read article
Featured article
Investigating the analytical robustness of the social and behavioural sciences
Balazs Aczel, Barnabas Szaszi, + 455 reanalysts (incl. Shawn T. Schwartz)
A large-scale crowd initiative in which 457 independent reanalysts examined 100 published social and behavioural science studies, finding that only 34% of reanalyses matched the original result within a ±0.05 Cohen's d tolerance, raising concerns about single-path analytical practices.
April 2, 2026
Read article
Featured article
Attending to Remember: Recent Advances in Methods and Theory
Shawn T. Schwartz, Haopei Yang, Alice M. Xue, Anthony D. Wagner
This article reviews recent advances in understanding how attention mechanisms shape episodic memory, examining neural substrates, oscillatory rhythms, age-related precision changes, and closed-loop experimental approaches to establish causal attention-memory relationships.
June 4, 2025
Read articleRecent Blog Posts
View allVersion-Controlled macOS System Settings
Houston is a native macOS app for managing hidden preferences through visual profiles you can save as files and commit to your dotfiles.
May 19, 20262 min read
Shipping Carbon: What I Learned About Product Design by Building in the App Store's Most Crowded Category
A look at the process, trade-offs, and philosophy behind building an app from scratch, and what I learned about constraint, incentive design, and building for real users as a solo developer.
March 11, 202611 min read
Stay updated
Subscribe to get notified about new posts and projects.