Introducing Maricela Abarca

Maricela Abarca was born in the San Francisco Bay Area, and hasn’t really ever left. She was raised in South San Francisco, got her B.A. across the Bay at the University of California Berkeley, and now works and lives in San Francisco. She studied evolutionary biology in college, where she had fun collecting data through field work but was weary of the computational methods used for analysis. It wasn’t until her recent position in the geology department at the California Academy of Sciences where she began to feel comfortable working with data through programming (although she still enjoys being outdoors). Her major responsibilities in the department include digitizing and standardizing biodiversity records, which allows these rich data sources that describe the history of life on Earth to be shared with the public and scientific community for education, outreach, and research. She is using the data wrangling skills she has developed in that role to similarly liberate data generated by thousands of dedicated Journey North volunteers and make these data more FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable). When she’s not hunched over her keyboard, Maricela enjoys hiking, eating sweets, swimming, dancing, and petting dogs (cats are okay too whenever they decide to let her pet them).