Maria Patterson

After earning a PhD in astronomy, Maria Patterson spent several years at the University of Chicago’s Center for Data Intensive Science, where she worked on cloud-based pipelines for automated analysis of NASA satellite imagery and architectures for interdisciplinary scientific “data commons”. During the initial stages for NOAA’s move to the cloud with the Big Data Project, Maria worked with the Open Commons Consortium to ensure the interests of the academic and scientific community were represented. She is currently a Research Scientist at the University of Washington, working on scientific data pipelines for managing streams of real-time data from large-scale astronomy projects, including the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). Maria is passionate about open science, diversity in computing, and making everyone’s life easier through tech and was recently named a modern hidden figure in STEM in PepsiCo and 21st Century Fox’s “Search for Hidden Figures.”