Ciera Martinez

Senior Program Manager
Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center for Data Science & Environment at Berkeley
Core Team
Ciera Martinez

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.  

Recent News

Plastics teaser

Data, Interactive-Tools, and AI for Actionable Change in Ending Plastic Pollution

The research is clear, plastic pollution has become a global crisis, with 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic waste produced by 2015 (Geyer et al. 2017).  Often research alone is hard to put into a usable form for action, but we identified a clear path to make a difference. The Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center for Data Science & Environment at Berkeley (Schmidt DSE) teamed up with University of Santa Barbara researchers to build a bridge from a research model to an interactive data visualization tool that can be used by policymakers to form laws on global plastic.

November 9, 2023
ecosystem

Honing in on our inaugural program areas

DSE began as a broad vision to utilize data for making a positive impact on environmental challenges. Our funders and founding team were united by an optimism for our planet's health and the pressing need to use everything at our disposal to counter our climate uncertain future. They saw a clear path to leverage current research and expertise and use data to uncover insights for action. Underlying our efforts are open practices - open data, open science, and open source to create work that can be transparent, scalable, easily accessible, and designed with community support.

August 3, 2023
Sather Gate

Meet the new team

We are thrilled to welcome the team that will be driving our programs, data, and engineering at the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center for Data Science and Environment (DSE)!
 

Each individual brings great talent, expertise and a passion for our mission. We are excited to have them onboard to design and implement open tools and data critical to improving the wellbeing of our planet and our communities.
 

As we move forward, we will work openly and share new findings, prototypes, and more, so stay tuned!
 

May 29, 2023