Alexis Garretson Candidate Statement

I became involved with ESIP in 2018, when I served as an ESIP Community Fellow for the Data Stewardship and Research Object Citation Clusters. It was then that I attended my first ESIP meetings, and presented a research poster. During this fellowship year, I was part of preparing the Data Risk Matrix for publication alongside other members of the cluster. I continued to grow my involvement over the next year, when I continued as a Community Fellow with Data Stewardship. I was awarded a FUNding Friday student award to begin working on a tool to track the provenance and research usage of biodiversity observations submitted by citizen/community scientists across various platforms (e.g., iNaturalist, eBird, Anecdata). Following my terms as a Community Fellow, I have remained an active member of the Data Stewardship Committee and have intermittently served as Co-Chair.

Beyond my leadership positions at ESIP, I maintain leadership activities in a variety of other settings. I am a full time PhD student at the Jackson Laboratory, where I am actively involved in student leadership, particularly through teaching foundational coding and data science courses through our involvement in The Carpentries. I have mentored multiple students, and taught the intro coding course for our summer undergraduate students in 2022. Additionally, I am a founding leader of the computational club at our university, where we host open Q&A and open coding sessions on a regular basis, host networking and career development events, and host workshops. In addition to my graduate involvement, I hold a part time position as a data manager with Anecdata, where I have preparing our community-contributed data for ingestion into GBIF and am working with our scientific partners to improve our data management tools and cyberinfrastructure for communities. I am also a Research Associate with Mohonk Preserve, a small conservation research institution and land trust with a large number of historical archival holdings. I began working with Mohonk as an Environmental Data Initiative summer fellow in 2019, where I learned about structured metadata and environmental data management, but have continued publishing data holdings ever since. Across these positions, I have provided more than 250,000 records to GBIF that have been used in more than 80 scientific outputs. Finally, I have volunteered with multiple citizen and community science projects, including as a curator with iNaturalist, a scribe with Bionomia, and was a AGU’s Thriving Earth Exchange Community Science Fellow supporting community science projects focused on the California coast. I maintain a volunteer association with GBIF as a Biodiversity Data Ambassador, with National Microbiome Data Collaborative as a champion, and as a Data and Software Carpentry Instructor with The Carpentries.

I am involved with ESIP because of the amazing opportunities to connect with other Earth Science Data professionals and practitioners, and because I deeply value the work of the partners and staff to improve the landscape of earth science information management. At each stage of my research, I focus on mobilizing data that might otherwise be discarded or that was collected for alternative purposes but can find a new life through reuse and synthesis. However, this focus of my work would not have been possible without the invaluable direction, support, and mentoring I received from so many members of ESIP.  I hope to continue supporting the work of the Data Stewardship Committee through organizing regular meetings and through providing logistical support to our ongoing  activities, but I also see this opportunity to serve in the Data Stewardship Committee as a chance to give back to the community that has supported me so much over the past few years.