Data Science by Design - Experimenting With a New Community of Practice For Data Creatives

Former BIDS Data Science Fellow Sara Stoudt is currently an Assistant Professor at Bucknell University. At UC Berkeley, she was a PhD student in Statistics advised by Professors Will Fithian and Perry de Valpine. Her research interests included ecological applications of statistics and assessing the identifiability and robustness of inference under model misspecification in species distribution models. She was also involved in teaching writing for statistics with Professor Deborah Nolan. Prior to being a BIDS Fellow, Sara was supported by a National Physical Sciences Consortium Fellowship with the National Institute of Standards and Technology and was part of the Data Science for the 21st Century: Environment and Society Training Program. Sara graduated with a BA in Mathematics and Statistics from Smith College.

BIDS Biology and Environmental Sciences Lead Ciera Martinez focuses on data intensive research projects that aim to understand how life on this planet evolves in reaction to the environment and climate – especially projects involving large and complex datasets.  A long-time open science advocate, Ciera has been involved with and continues to be interested in working on training for open data, education, publishing, and software, including developing community standards for data management practices.  As a 2019 Mozilla Open Science Fellow, she connected her love of data and museums and worked on projects aimed at understanding and increasing the usability of biodiversity and natural history museum data.  She received her PhD in Plant Biology from UC Davis, researching the genetic mechanisms regulating plant architecture.  She then went on to become a NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley in the Molecular and Cellular Biology Department, studying genome evolution.  She was also a BIDS postdoctoral Data Science Fellow for 3 years, working on undergraduate research practices, data science training, community development, and best practices for data science, diversity and inclusion, and computational research.  

Váleri N. Vásquez is a PhD student in the Energy and Resources Group, a former Moore/Sloan Fellow at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science, and a former research scholar in the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory. Váleri’s research interests include the use of computational models to examine the environmental drivers and economic impacts of infectious diseases. She is currently studying questions relevant to the use of gene drive systems for malarial control. Prior to graduate school, Váleri focused on international and domestic climate change issues at the U.S. Department of State, the Center for American Progress, and the White House Council on Environmental Quality. She holds an MS from the University of California, Berkeley and a BA from the College of William and Mary.