Dr Paige Martin1, Dr. Kelsey Druken1, Dr. Heidi Nettelbeck1
1Australia's Climate Simulator (ACCESS-NRI), Australia
Biography:
Paige leads the User Training Team at Australia’s Climate Simulator (ACCESS-NRI) and is working to build a comprehensive and impactful training framework for ACCESS-NRI tools to ensure that they are useful to the Australian climate modelling community.
Paige enjoys engaging with researchers and supporting community-driven action around open-source, scientific tooling. She has extensive experience in leading international capacity sharing activities and has led the Python computing portion of a West African oceanography summer school (https://coessing.org) for many years. Before joining ACCESS-NRI, Paige worked at NASA Headquarters as a Support Scientist in the Office of the Chief Science Data Officer.
Paige is passionate about the idea of open science – that every step of our science should be made accessible and transparent to all. She is also involved in international, open science-related communities: she is a steering committee member of Pangeo (https://pangeo.io/) – a community for big data geoscience – and OSSci (https://www.opensource.science/) – a community at the intersection of science and open-source software.
Paige was awarded a PhD in Physical Oceanography from the University of Michigan, and a postdoc in Climate Data Science at Columbia University.
When not behind a computer, Paige enjoys standing on her hands, doing partner acrobatics and aerial arts, performing in musical theater, taking nature walks to look for birds, and enjoying time with her family.
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3538-633X
Abstract:
In 2024, Australia’s Climate Simulator (ACCESS-NRI) launched the trial phase of a PhD internship program. The program enables PhD students to join the ACCESS-NRI team for a few months and get first-hand experience of what it means to be a Research Software Engineer (RSE) in climate modelling. Interns are offered the chance to learn a range of skills, from developing scientific software collaboratively to understanding the technical foundations of climate models. Within this trial phase, which was open to current PhD students at the Australian National University, we have hosted four interns for 3-4 months each. In this presentation, we will share our experience designing and implementing the program, highlight key learnings and outcomes from the trial phase, and discuss our vision for the full program moving forward. Based on feedback from the trial phase, we plan to extend eligibility to include PhD students from other Australian universities when the full program launches in 2026.