From the field and lab to data wrangling and facilitating interagency collaboration- how I ended up in the data science world.

Abstract:

I work to build systems that make environmental data more accessible and usable for others—a role that I love and, ten years ago, would not have guessed I would play. I transitioned from conducting pure research to learning more about data curation and information science, and eventually, to combining knowledge of both the research and data science worlds in my current position at the U.S. Geological Survey Center for Integrated Data Analytics (USGS CIDA). At the USGS, I primarily work on the Water Quality Portal, an interagency tool for providing high performance, standards driven access to water quality data, and the USGS Publications Warehouse, which plays a key and ever expanding role in providing access to USGS Publications and their associated data sets. Both projects require an overarching focus on building services to make science data more visible and accessible to users. In addition, listening to the needs of the research scientists who are both collecting and using the data to improve the tools I guide the development of. Concepts that I learned at the University Of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Graduate School of Library and Information Science Data Curation Education Program were critical to a successful transition from the research world to the data science world. Data curation and data science are playing an ever-larger role in surmounting current and future data challenges at the USGS, and the need for people with interests in both research and data science will continue to grow.