MEDS 2026
Pronouns: he/him
Bio
Austin Martinez is a graduate student at the University of California, Santa Barbara’s Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, he is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Environmental Data Science. He graduated with honors from CSU Dominguez Hills in 2024 with a B.S. in Biology: Ecology and Environmental Science, where he served as treasurer of the Biological Honor Society, was a member of LSAMP, and researched the causes and consequences of rarity in Encelia species using spatial data, GIS, and RStudio.
After accidentally killing his pet fish by using untreated sink water, Austin became curious about water quality and why rural water sources like his were unsafe to drink compared to city tap water. This experience, combined with his background in coding and machine learning, led him to the Biosphere 2, where he built machine learning models to predict arsenic contamination in groundwater across the Colorado Plateau and evaluated their accuracy. This project sparked his interest in data science and its applications in the environmental field.
Austin wants to expand his data science knowledge to become a data scientist focusing on GIS or water quality data and to help make important data consumable to everyone, regardless of educational or cultural background.