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.

Feb 2024
Two months of work with the amazing journalists at Grist culminated in the publishing of Misplaced Trust, our investigation into the extractive practices happening on stolen Indigenous lands that benefit land-grant universities across the West. I was honored to contribute the maps, frontend development, and cloud infrastructure for this piece, and to help out with eleventh-hour bug fixes on the data processing pipeline. The code for every interactive is open-source, as is the data analysis.
Sep 2023
I gave my talk Supporting Data Journalism through Compilers for Visual Inputs at Strange Loop 2023, the final Strange Loop. I also had a blast meeting the Ink & Switch and tldraw folks, having wonderfully too-long dinners and too-late nights, and learning about everything from concatenative stack-based programming languages to how GitHub code search works to supporting dynamic program analysis in VM design.
May 2023
My talk, Supporting Data Journalism through Compilers for Visual Inputs was accepted to Strange Loop 2023!