Ciera Martinez is currently the Research Lead of Biodiversity and Environmental Sciences at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science. Her research focuses on data intensive research projects that aim to understand how life on this planet evolves in reaction to the environment and climate. A long-time open science advocate, Ciera has been involved in training for open data, education, and software. 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 from UC Davis in the Plant Biology Dept. researching the genetic mechanisms regulating plant architecture. She then went on to be a NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley in the Molecular and Cellular Biology Dept. studying genome evolution and was a BIDS Postdoc Fellow for three years where she worked on undergraduate research practices, data science training, community development, and best practices for data science and computational research