Speaker: Dawn URycki, Data Scientist, Mathematical Biology and Systems Monitoring Program

Northwest Fisheries Science Center, NOAA NMFS |

Topic:  The Science of Data: Leveraging new and upcycled approaches to gain scientific insight from complex datasets

Most scientists and researchers engage in at least some aspects of data science in their regular research workflows, but what is data science, and what–exactly–does a data scientist do?  I began as a data scientist with NOAA Fisheries in late 2024, among a small cohort who were the first ever formally hired to this role at NOAA. I will talk about some of the various scientific and unscientific projects I worked on during my PhD and postdoctoral research that prepared me for this new role, as well as the diverse datasets, from aquatic microbiomes in the Pacific Northwest, to evapotranspiration in the agricultural Midwest, to wildfire history across all eleven Canadian provinces, that prompted me to pursue a career in data science.  I will share some of the joys and challenges of data science work, what drew me to it, and some of the lessons I’ve learned along the way.  I hope that you will come away from this talk with a fresh perspective and some ideas about how you might leverage data science techniques to advance your unique research.