In Conversation with Paige Martin

On this ACCESStory issue, we had a chat with Dr Paige Martin, Lead of the ACCESS-NRI User Engagement Team.

Where did you grow up and how did you come to be part of the ACCESS-NRI team? 

I grew up in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, USA. It’s a university town of about 100,000 people in the middle of cornfields. I also spent two separate years in Paris, France with my family when I was 4 and 12. Since graduating from high school, I’ve bounced around quite a bit, including living in Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, and Germany.

I first heard about ACCESS-NRI when I was doing research with Andy Hogg and others at the ANU Research School of Earth Sciences. I started at ACCESS-NRI earlier this year, in February. I first started as a research software engineer in the MED Team, before beginning my current role as User Training Team Lead at the start of April.

Tell us a bit about your career before ACCESS-NRI 

I have an academic research background in physical oceanography. After majoring in physics and minoring in French as an undergraduate, I spent a year doing climate-related research in Potsdam, Germany and it was there that I discovered my excitement for applying physics and math to the climate system. I went on to do a PhD at the University of Michigan in physical oceanography. During my PhD, I did two 3-month research visits to the ANU to work with Andy Hogg, which was my first time in Australia.

I did a Postdoc in the Climate Data Science Lab at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University in New York City. The group worked at the intersection of climate science and data science – we were a mix of climate researchers and software engineers, with the goal of working together to produce useful technical tools for climate research, alongside doing the research itself. It was the perfect environment for me to develop my scientific software skills, and I was also exposed to many welcoming open-source software communities. It was at this stage that I started getting very interested in thinking about how we do academic research and how to make computational research workflows more efficient, reproducible, and inclusive.

After the Postdoc, I started a job at NASA Headquarters as a Support Scientist in the area of open science. I was thrilled to have found a position that was outside of traditional academia but that allowed me to remain part of the science research community. In this role I worked on a variety of projects, including helping to develop and deliver training on open science, representing my NASA office at a international conferences and events, running a grant solicitation that supported open-source software development, working with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to create an award for champions of open science, and strategizing about NASA’s open science plan moving forward. After a year at NASA, I moved to Australia and soon after started working at ACCESS-NRI!

For the past 6 years, starting as a PhD student, I had the pleasure of teaching Python at the Coastal Ocean Environment Summer School in Nigeria and Ghana (COESSING). This program was instrumental in helping me gain valuable experience providing technical training to people across different countries and cultures. Teaching at COESSING helped me understand the power of open-source software in the sciences, and helped me realize that I like working at the intersection of the technical and community aspects of science.

What do you do at ACCESS-NRI and what excites you about this work?  

I am the User Training Team Lead at ACCESS-NRI. Our team’s goal is to support a comprehensive and impactful training framework to ensure that ACCESS-NRI tools are useful to and being used by the Australian climate modeling community.

I am thrilled to be in this role, because I understand how important effective training is for building a healthy research ecosystem. Effective training is not just about the technical content, but is a way to share important concepts and create safe spaces for open discussion so that individuals feel empowered to ask questions and do their science in a robust, transparent, and efficient manner. I’m particularly excited to take on this role at ACCESS-NRI, with its focus on collaborative community-developed, open-source software development. Having worked with underrepresented groups in the past, I am passionate about making scientific tools and data accessible to different audiences, which aligns with the ACCESS-NRI values.

What do you like to do outside work? 

I enjoy doing a wide array of activities outside of work, from performing in musical theater to pole vaulting to doing aerial silks, partner acrobatics, and hand balancing.

With my husband, I like to go for nature walks to look for birds and to play with our 5-month old puppy, Merlin. We also enjoy eating fancy cheeses and doing crossword puzzles.