About the Author: Matthew T. Lawder

For an in-depth look at my study, you can check out: Modeling, Simulation, and Analysis of Lithium-Ion Batteries for Grid-Scale Applications. To give a brief summary, most of my work focused on studying the lifetime degradation of batteries based on different charge/discharge patterns, specifically for large scale applications such as eclectic vehicles and batteries coupled with solar installtions. The main question we wanted to answer was, "How will non-standard charge and discharge patterns affect the life of Lithium-ion batteries?"
Throughout my PhD work, I spent a lot of time digging through large data sets both from the model output and from actual battery experiments in the lab. I was focused on discerning the important points and trends from thousands and ten-of-thousand of cycles with millions of individual data points for each battery. I enjoyed the data analysis portion of the study so much that after my PhD, I took part in the Data Incubator and then joined 1010data working on building better data tools to perform analytics on billion row datasets. After working at 1010data for 6 years, I joined Audible in Newark, NJ on their Analytics team.
Outside of work, I'm an avid runner. Since competing in high school at St. Louis University High and college at Butler University, I continued to train and have completed 10 marathons. My best finishes include placing 50th in the 2013 Chicago Marathon (2:26:21), 46th in the 2015 Boston Marathon (2:26:15), and 44th in the 2016 New York City Marathon (2:30:39). If you've read many of my blogs or poked around this site, I'm also a general data enthusiast and really enjoy digging into transportation, infrastructure, and census data.
If you have any general questions for me or inquires about the site you can email me at matt@stlannnex.com. Additionally you can find my LinkedIn profile here.
About the Website: STL Annex
The other aspect that will often be consistent across posts will be that many of the analyses will focus around St. Louis based themes or data. For some tools or data that is releavent outside of just St. Louis, I'll often start with the St. Louis section of data and then expand from there and will probably be including New Jersey or New York data next. One area where I've been lacking so far, is posting thorough methodolgies about each analysis and I hope to get more of those added in the future, but with limited time so far, I have focused on putting out the actual analysis first and will hopefully be able to clean up more later. As always, if you have any questions or comments about the tools, the data, or the analysis please reach out to matt@stlannex.com.
Good Links
Urban STL: A great forum for all things St. Louis.
St. Louis City Talk: If you want to get to know a neighborhood or Park in St. Louis, they do an awesome job exploring every facet of an area (and there are lots of pictures!) and also has posts on other topics too.
STL Aviation News: Posts great flight data about Lambert (and Mid-America). Definitely worth a follow on twitter too (@AviationSTL)
NextSTL: While the site isn't kept up to date as much as it once was, the archives still have a wealth of great insight into development projects in STL over the past decade.
St. Louis Patina: Another great look into the buildings and neighborhoods of St. Louis with great images.
CityScene STL: The most well kept site on new developments around St. Louis.
TransStats: Bereau of Transportation Statistics treasure trove of data. A little hard to navigate, but has some really great sets to dig into.