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.

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.
Feb 2022
I gave a talk at the EPIC Data Lab Seminar at UC Berkeley about my work on reviz.
Jan 2022
I open-sourced and released reviz, a lightweight engine for automatically reverse engineering data visualizations from the DOM. Check out the announcement notebook on Observable.