Recognizing Plant Cell authors: Ciera Martinez

Ciera Martinez, first author of Spatial transcriptional signatures define margin morphogenesis along the proximal-distal and medio-lateral axes in tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) leaves

Current Position: Research Lead, Biodiversity and Environmental Sciences, Berkeley Institute of Data Science
Education: PhD, Plant Biology from UC Davis and BS in Biology with Chemistry Minor from Northeastern Illinois University

Non-scientific Interests:  knitting, running, playing and listening to music

Brief bio: Ciera’s research focuses on data intensive projects that explore the ability of life on this planet to evolve in response to the environment.  A long-time open science advocate, Ciera has been involved in advocating and providing training for open data, education in data management, open publishing, and open source 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 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, diversity and inclusion, and computational research.