BERKELEY - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Data Visualization Developer
Job Titles:
- Researcher
- Postdoctoral Researcher / Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center for Data Science
Amy Van Scoyoc is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center for Data Science and Environment at UC Berkeley (DSE). As a wildlife ecologist and data scientist, Amy focuses on understanding how society, land-use, and climate affect biodiversity using a suite of spatial tools.
Amy comes to DSE after working with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife to implement large-scale biodiversity monitoring across the Mojave desert and measure the impact of extreme drought on desert wildlife. Amy obtained a PhD in Environmental Science from UC Berkeley, with an emphasis on animal movement and remote sensing, and a BS degree in Biology from Dartmouth College.
Ann Basil is a senior at UC Berkeley majoring in Computer Science, and an undergraduate researcher with the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center for Data Science and Environment (DSE). Having initially come to UC Berkeley heading towards an Environmental Science degree, Ann pivoted towards the CS field to help innovate new, interdisciplinary ideas to maintain and protect ecosystems due to her passion for ecology and technology. She has worked on a variety of projects, including working on local goals for heading towards the UN Sustainability Goal: Affordable and Clean Energy, mapping animal populations, creating a simple neural net, and developing game simulators. In her free time, Ann enjoys writing stories, drawing, playing Dungeons and Dragons, swimming, and bouldering.
Job Titles:
- Fellow
- Product Manager
- Product Manager Fellow / Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center for Data Science
Annie Snyder is a Product Manager Fellow at the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center for Data Science and Environment at UC Berkeley (DSE) in partnership with Schmidt Futures. She works with the Indigenous Environmental Stewardship program.
Annie has previously worked on responsible AI at Facebook and Microsoft, social media regulation at MIT's AI Policy Forum, and technology community codesign at MIT's Center for Advanced Urbanism, among other things. She graduated from MIT with a degree in Computer Science and Economics, and a concentration in Computing and Society.
Job Titles:
- Senior Data Scientist / Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center for Data Science
Brookie Guzder-Williams is an environmental data science researcher leveraging satellite imagery and neural networks to better understand stresses on the earth's natural resources. His research is focused on designing, training, analyzing and deploying novel neural network architectures for global scale computer vision tasks.
He comes to the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center for Data Science and Environment at Berkeley from World Resources Institute where he served as Director of Data Science. Brookie's background is theoretical physics. He was an International Postdoctoral Fellow for the National Science Foundation, has a Ph.D. in String Theory from the University of California Santa Barbara, and an undergraduate degree in both Physics and Mathematics from the University of Colorado.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- Faculty Advisor & Associate Professor
Carl Boettiger is an Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at UC Berkeley. Carl works on problems in ecological forecasting and decision making under uncertainty, with applications for global change, conservation and natural resource management. Carl is particularly interested in how we can predict or manage ecological systems that may experience regime shifts: sudden and dramatic changes that challenge both our models and available data. The rapid expansion in both computational power and the available ecological and environmental data enables and requires new mathematical, statistical and computational approaches to these questions. Ecology has much to learn about what are and are not useful from advances in informatics & computer science, just as it has from statistics and mathematics. Traditional approaches to ecological modeling and resource management such as stochastic dynamic systems, Bayesian inference, and optimal control theory must be adapted both to take advantage of all available data while also dealing with its imperfections. Carl's approach blends ecological theory with the synthesis of heterogeneous data and the development of software-- a combination now recognized as data science. Carl is a co-founder of the rOpenSci project, a senior fellow at BIDS, and a science adviser to NCEAS, reflecting his interests in open science, data science, and ecoinformatics.
Job Titles:
- Senior Program Manager / Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center for Data Science
- Senior Program Manager With the Eric
Ciera Martinez is a Senior Program Manager with the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center for Data Science and Environment (DSE) who 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. Ciera comes to DSE after serving as Biology and Environmental Sciences Lead for the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS).
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.
Job Titles:
- Lead Undergraduate Data Science Intern / Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center for Data Science
Danielle Louie is a fourth-year undergraduate at UC Berkeley, majoring in Data Science and Sustainable Environmental Design. She is currently interning as a Data Scientist at the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center for Data Science and Environment at UC Berkeley (DSE). Danielle is passionate about leveraging technology to model and design sustainable solutions that are accessible to all communities. Her current work with the Indigenous Environmental Stewardship team involves developing executables, curating large datasets, and creating visualizations. In addition, Danielle is actively partaking in the discourse about data sovereignty and integrity.
Dhruva Bhagwat is an intended Applied Mathematics and Data Science Major with an overarching interest in utilizing data and mathematical modeling to make predictions and impact the world in positive ways.
He is currently interning with DSE under the URAP program in the field of reinforcement learning to help create ecological environments describing interactions between different species, and optimize actions within those environments.
Job Titles:
- Associate Adjunct Professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Poli
- Faculty Director & Associate Professor
Douglas McCauley is an Associate Adjunct Professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at UC Berkeley and an Associate Professor in the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology at UC Santa Barbara. Doug is an ecologist and conservation biologist that uses a diverse suite of methods to better understand how nature works and to create new applied research tools to better manage and conserve biodiversity. His research often involves leveraging the power of new technologies and insight from data science to address complex environmental problems and bring together the diverse stakeholders needed to effectively implement these solutions. Doug leads the Benioff Ocean Initiative at UC Santa Barbara. He was named a Sloan Research Fellow in the Ocean Sciences and he serves on the World Economic Forum's Friends of Ocean Action leadership team.
Eric Schmidt led Google as CEO for a decade and as executive chairman for four years. He also served as executive chairman of Alphabet for three years and as technical advisor. A journalist early in her career, Wendy Schmidt also worked in marketing communications in Silicon Valley and since 2006 has led the couple's philanthropy as president of the Schmidt Family Foundation and Schmidt Ocean Institute.
Job Titles:
- Undergraduate Researcher / Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center for Data Science
Ethan Aquino is a veteran and a junior at UC Berkeley majoring in Environmental Sciences, and an undergraduate researcher with the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center for Data Science and Environment (DSE). He is passionate about leveraging technology to create innovative solutions for environmental restoration. He has experience developing web applications for the US Air Force in addition to fieldwork in species population mapping, restoration planting, and invasive species management. In his free time, he enjoys bouldering, cooking, and reading.
Job Titles:
- Undergraduate Data Science Intern / Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center for Data Science
Evan Lingo is an undergraduate at UC Berkeley majoring in Environmental Economics and Policy and intending to double major in Data Science. At DSE, he is currently assisting in the development of an LLM-aided GIS interface to help inform conservation decision-making. In particular, his work involves guiding LLMs trained in tool use to correctly handle user queries.
In the future, Evan looks forward to spending his career working at the intersection of data science and environmental studies. At present, Evan enjoys playing badminton, attending competitive speech tournaments, watching movies, and re-watching the hit TV series "The Edge of Sleep".
Job Titles:
- Postdoctoral Researcher / Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center for Data Science
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor in Statistics at UC
- Faculty Director & Associate Professor
Fernando Pérez is an Associate Professor in Statistics at UC Berkeley and scientist at LBNL. He builds open source tools for humans to use computers as companions in thinking and collaboration, mostly in the scientific Python ecosystem (IPython, Jupyter & friends). A computational physicist by training, his research interests include questions at the nexus of software and geoscience, seeking to build the computational and data ecosystem to tackle problems like climate change with collaborative, open, reproducible, and extensible scientific practices. He is a co-founder of Project Jupyter, the 2i2c.org initiative, the Berkeley Institute for Data Science and the NumFOCUS Foundation. He is a recipient of the 2017 ACM Software System Award and the 2012 FSF Award for the Advancement of Free Software.
Iris Qiu is a second-year graduate student at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and a journalism fellow with the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center for Data Science and Environment (DSE). She earned her bachelor's degree from Cornell University. Initially drawn to journalism for its power to amplify underrepresented voices, she developed a passion for data visualization and analysis, using them to uncover hidden narratives within large datasets. Her work spans local news reporting, investigative journalism, and interactive graphics. In her free time, she enjoys playing the guitar, cooking, and reading.
Job Titles:
- Faculty Advisor & Professor
- G.R. & W.M. Goertz Professor
Justin Brashares is the G.R. & W.M. Goertz Professor in UC Berkeley's Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management. Justin's research combines approaches from ecology with interdisciplinary environmental science to better understand how human activities are impacting biodiversity, and to highlight and communicate the everyday consequences of these changes for society. Work in Justin's group extends traditional environmental science to consider the economic, political and cultural factors that drive and, in turn, are driven by global change. Through these efforts, Justin and his group at Berkeley strive to propose empirically-based, action-oriented strategies for the conservation of ecosystems and the services they provide us.
Kelly Liu is a first-year news documentary filmmaking student at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and is a journalism fellow with the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center for Data Science and Environment (DSE). She holds a degree from New York University, where she double-majored in Broadcast Journalism and International Relations.
Passionate about visual storytelling, Kelly focuses on pressing issues such as climate change, social justice, and human rights, with a particular commitment to amplifying the voices of marginalized communities. Through her work, she aims to shed light on underreported stories and drive meaningful conversations for change.
Job Titles:
- Executive Director
- Executive Director / Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center for Data Science
- Executive Director for the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center for Data Science
Kevin Koy is Executive Director for the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center for Data Science and Environment at Berkeley (DSE) where he works to enable the Center's mission to develop impactful computational solutions to the challenges facing our environment. He brings more than two decades of experience working in environmental science, data science, and human-centered design with the goal of providing people with the best environments and approaches to take on complex challenges.
Kevin comes to the Schmidt Center for DSE from the global design and innovation firm, IDEO, where he served as Senior Director working to develop a data-enabled design practice. Previously, he was the founding Executive Director of the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS), Managing Director of Stanford University's Data Science and AI Affiliates Programs, Executive Director of UC Berkeley's Geospatial Innovation Facility (GIF), and Geospatial/Remote Sensing Specialist for the American Museum of Natural History's Center for Biodiversity & Conservation and the Smithsonian Institution's Conservation Biology Institute.
Job Titles:
- Postdoctoral Researcher / Stone Center for Environmental Stewardship / Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center for Data Science
- Researcher With the Schmidt Center for Data Science
Kristin is a postdoctoral researcher with the Schmidt Center for Data Science and Environment and the Stone Center for Environmental Stewardship at UC Berkeley. She got her master's degree and PhD at Colorado State University and her bachelor's degree at The College of William and Mary. Her academic background largely has focused on collaborative, applied research to inform bird conservation, such as stakeholder-driven grazing management practices to support grassland birds and using statistical modeling and decision science tools with a national group of scientists/biologists to investigate potential drivers of population decline for a widespread falcon species. Over the course of graduate school, however, Kristin became increasingly excited by the potential of big data to address environmental challenges from local to landscape scales. She aims to use the combined powers of collaboration, connection, data, and technology to inform the ethical and equitable development/implementation of conservation and land management approaches. At Berkeley, she'll focus this goal on conservation approaches for working landscapes
Job Titles:
- Chief Editor of the European Geoscience Union 's Biogeosciences
- Postdoctoral Researcher / Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center for Data Science
Lucia obtained her PhD in Life Science from the Technical University of Munich. She holds master's degrees in Mathematical Modeling from King's College London, UK, in Environmental Science and Engineering from the Technical University of Berlin, Germany, and has conducted research and academic stays at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Germany, and the American University of Beirut, Lebanon.
Job Titles:
- Data Scientist / Research Software Engineer / Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center for Data Science
Magali de Bruyn is a Data Scientist / Research Software Engineer for the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center for Data Science and Environment at UC Berkeley (DSE). She is representing the DSE at COP16.
Magali applies computer science and community engagement to drive systemic change towards greater sustainability. Her focus is on the technical implementation of Indigenous digital sovereignty for environmental stewardship. To this end, she closely collaborates with Indigenous Peoples and Native Nations, as well as the United Nations, specifically UNEP. She has experience tackling environmental and data challenges in-person in 7 countries across the world (notably in India, Belgium, and the US).
Prior to DSE, Magali applied web scraping, data science, and natural language processing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to research sustainable urbanization, environmental economics, and greenwashing. In addition to working at a number of green tech start-ups and at Dalberg, she has led on-the-ground qualitative and quantitative research in rural India on the preservation of sacred groves. She has also developed computer vision pipelines for marine species at Friday Harbor Labs (the University of Washington) and built scrapers to collect all the climate laws in the world for the World Policy Analysis Center at UCLA. Magali graduated with a degree in Computer Science and a concentration in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning from Minerva University and is an alumna of the United World Colleges (UWC). In addition to English, she knows French, Spanish, Dutch, German, and Hindi.
Job Titles:
- Research Software Engineer / Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center for Data Science
- Research Software Engineer at the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center for Data Science
Matt Fisher is a Research Software Engineer at the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center for Data Science and Environment at UC Berkeley (DSE). Matt is passionate about open science and open source software, inclusive and welcoming communities, Earth's climate, tinkering, and music.
Prior to joining DSE, Matt was a Research Software Engineer at National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) where he worked on software projects like QGreenland and earthaccess. In 2023, Matt gained a new passion for teaching through experiences with workshop design and administration and his role as a NASA Mentor in the Openscapes program. Matt is following his passion and is now a certified Carpentries Instructor.
In his free time, Matt loves playing with dogs, playing the keyboard and drums, organic gardening, soldering stuff, and "testing" his partner's kitchen experiments.
Job Titles:
- Undergraduate Software Engineering Intern / Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center for Data Science
Max Taniguchi-King is a senior at UC Berkeley studying Data Science and Environmental Earth Science. At DSE, he's excited to be working with the Indigenous Environmental Stewardship team on their wildlife image classification app.
He's passionate about using data science to help address the climate crisis and has interests in machine learning, climate dynamics, remote sensing, and ecology. In the past, he trained statistical models to emulate climate systems at the University of Washington and designed frameworks for estimating ecosystem productivity at UC Berkeley. He enjoys trying new recipes, spending time with friends and family, and taking naps.
Job Titles:
- Senior Program Manager / Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center for Data Science
Maya Weltman-Fahs joins the inaugural staff of the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center for Data Science and Environment at Berkeley (DSE) as a Senior Program Manager. In this role, Maya collaborates with the team to define the mission and focus the research program for the Center, calling upon her diverse interdisciplinary background and her experience in both industry and academia.
Maya's academic background spans several institutions and disciplines. She carries degrees in Sustainable Agriculture and Agroecology (UC Santa Cruz), Climate Science and Policy (Columbia University), and Natural Resources (Cornell University). She served as a lecturer at Macaulay Honors College (City University of New York) and Santa Clara University, supporting young scholars in GIS, Applied Ecology, and the Scientific Process. Most recently Maya was in the industrial space, as a Strategic Map Planning Manager for the autonomous vehicle startup Nuro. Maya is thrilled to support the DSE in creating environmental solutions that have a real impact!
Job Titles:
- Postdoctoral Researcher / Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center for Data Science
- Researcher at the Eric
Maya Zomer is a postdoctoral researcher at the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center for Data Science and Environment at UC Berkeley. As a plant ecologist, Maya focuses on the intersection of post-fire recovery and climate change, contributing to the National Park Service Climate Change Decision Support project.
Maya brings expertise in post-fire regeneration in Mediterranean Basin shrublands under global change, as well as in fire impacts in Northern Andean páramo ecosystems. Her research has spanned plant physiology and community ecology, with an emphasis on intraspecific trait variability along climate gradients to understand species' ability to adap to environmental change.
She holds a PhD in Biodiversity and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Valencia, Spain, along with postgraduate degrees in Ecology (PGDip and MPhil) from the University of East Anglia and the University of Plymouth, UK, and a bachelor's degree in International Development from the University of Sussex, UK.
Job Titles:
- Data Scientist / Research Software Engineer / Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center for Data Science
- Data Scientist / Research Software Engineer at the Eric
Nick Gondek is a Data Scientist / Research Software Engineer at the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center for Data Science and Environment (DSE). He is dedicated to creating simple and scalable data infrastructure to address complex challenges in our changing environment, particularly within conservation biology, agriculture, and social science.
Nick brings diverse experience across DSE's focal areas of biodiversity and climate resilience. After starting his career catching songbirds for evolutionary biology research projects in Arizona and Hawaii, he worked with Conservation Metrics to develop machine learning tools to detect seabirds, bats, and elephants in acoustic recordings for wildlife managers and research groups worldwide. He later worked with sustainable ag startup Unfold to develop lettuce and tomato varieties for vertical farms and greenhouses, and most recently, with startup Blumen Systems to streamline the siting and permitting process for developers of clean energy infrastructure.
Prior to joining DSE, Nick obtained a Master's degree in the Computational Analysis of Public Policy from The University of Chicago, with an emphasis on econometric, database design, and machine learning applications within social science. With the University of Minnesota, he earned dual BS degrees in (1) Fisheries, Wildlife Conservation Biology, and (2) Environmental Sciences, Policy, and Management.
Job Titles:
- Senior Research Data Scientist / Software Engineer / Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center for Data Science
- Senior Research Data Scientist / Software Engineer at the Eric
Sam Pottinger is a Senior Research Data Scientist / Software Engineer at the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center for Data Science and Environment. He currently contributes to DSE projects in plastic pollution and regenerative agriculture.
Sam is interested in creating digital spaces that foster collaboration and enable thinking within complex problems. This work often involves crafting digital tools at the intersection of participatory design, artificial intelligence, information design (data visualization), software engineering, and game design. His tools and interactive models have been part of DSE publications in Science and JOSS. Sam also teaches interactive data science.
Prior to DSE, Sam worked for small organizations including LabJack (DAQ / IoT), Plenty (agriculture), and EVERY (synthetic biology) as well as larger companies such as IDEO, Google, and Apple. In addition to being named an inventor on a number of patents / patent applications, he was a contributor to the Processing project. He currently maintains the Sketchingpy and Pyafscgap open source projects. Other contributions available on his GitHub.
Job Titles:
- Administrative Manager / Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center for Data Science
- Administrative Manager for the Schmidt Center for DSE
Stacey Dorton is the Administrative Manager for the Schmidt Center for DSE, serving as our Office Jedi. She is an administrative professional with 25 years' experience in office management. She has done administrative work for a wide variety of organizations, including an elementary school, psychiatric facility, waste management firm, and a catering company. She also has extensive experience in the event management and social media fields. She is a native of the Oakland/Berkeley area and a graduate of UC Berkeley (class of '95) majoring in women's studies. GO BEARS!
Job Titles:
- Communications Manager
- Communications Manager / Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center for Data Science
- Communications Manager at the Eric
Suzanne is the Communications Manager at the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center for Data Science and Environment at UC Berkeley (DSE). She works to translate DSE innovations in environmental science, data science, and design into compelling materials that inspire and inform decision makers and the general public.
Eric and Wendy Schmidt have been active philanthropists since 2006, when they started the Schmidt Family Foundation to address challenges facing communities around the world, working for clean renewable energy, healthy food systems, healthy oceans and the protection of human rights. They also founded Schmidt Ocean Institute to advance oceanographic research by offering access to the world's first year-round philanthropic research vessel in exchange for making their findings publicly available. In 2017, the couple founded Schmidt Futures, a philanthropic initiative that invests in exceptional people making the world better and brings them together in interdisciplinary networks to solve problems in science and society.