Parker Ziegler / Software Engineer and Cartographer

Hey, I'm Parker.

I am a computer scientist, software engineer, and cartographer based in Berkeley, CA. My passions lie at the intersection of programming languages (PL), human-computer interaction (HCI), data visualization, and geospatial technologies. I currently spend a lot of my time researching and working on programming tools for data journalists, Earth and climate scientists, and social scientists.

I also believe place shapes every part of who we are. These are the places that have shaped me.

What I'm Up To

I'm currently a Ph.D. student in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department at UC Berkeley, advised by Professor Sarah Chasins. My research focuses on using novel techniques from programming languages and human-computer interaction research to build useful and usable programming tools for data journalists, climate researchers, and social scientists. Previously, I worked with the wonderful and talented folks at Formidable, where I contributed to their open source work. Check out some of my recent contributions.

Sep 2022I submitted the first paper of my Ph.D. to the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems!
Sep 2022
I passed the Programming Systems Preliminary Exam at UC Berkeley! A summer of studying culminated in an hour of questions on static and dynamic dispatch, symbolic execution, and axiomatic semantics.
Apr 2022
I gave a talk at the Programming Systems Seminar at UC Berkeley discussing early findings from my need-finding study with users of geospatial data.