Alumna Highlight—Magali de Bruyn

‍Can you describe the work you are doing now?

If I had to summarize my work in three words, they would be thought-provoking, humbling, and ambitious.

I work at the intersection of computer science, environmental sustainability, and community collaboration at the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center for Data Science & Environment at UC Berkeley. My team’s focus is on the technical implementation of Indigenous digital sovereignty for environmental stewardship. What does this actually mean? We work with Indigenous Peoples, Tribes, Native Nations, local land-based communities, and the United Nations to promote their leadership role in environmental sustainability and ensure data serves them, not vice-versa. I co-lead our team working on this. In this role, I leverage my computer science background and my international relations skills.

Most recently, this led me to represent UC Berkeley at the UN’s global conference on biodiversity, COP16. When I am not trying to reach diplomats or keep up with conversations in fast Spanish about organizing as Amazonian peoples, I am closely collaborating with and learning from an inspiring team of postdocs, program managers, undergraduate interns, professors, fellow computer scientists, and local Indigenous partners. Together, we build pipelines – all the way from hardware selection to software applications to computer vision models – for Tribes and local communities to monitor wildlife and manage their land. We hold events, write papers, and organize group conversations to unpack what Indigenous digital sovereignty and data governance mean, technically speaking. And we listen. A lot of our work is about shifting power (whether that takes the form of money, recognition, or decision-making) back to the communities from which colonial institutions have historically extracted, committed genocide against, and left with environmental burdens. We seek to be allies in recentering traditional ecological knowledge.

In parallel, I mentor undergraduates, PhD students, and post-docs to build out their software development skills and software stacks. I put work in to build an inclusive tech culture as the only female staff engineer on the team. In this role, I find myself leaning on my experiences in my tutorials, specifically with Prof. Perry and Prof. Howe. I also spend a significant amount of time leading our decolonizing data program (more on this below) and contributing to other projects at our center, including a technical tool and research paper for global plastics pollution negotiations recently published in Science.

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What part of your Minerva experience most significantly informed your current perspective on the world and the way you approach what you are working on?

Learning about complexity science is life-changing (shout-out to Prof. Perry and Prof. McAllister). Combine that with the need to navigate vastly different systems across rotation cities, and I got three notable effects:

1. an awareness of how much experiences, perspectives, and behaviors can vary across ecosystems;
2. a sense of responsibility towards communities across the world, especially underserved spaces;
3. (trust in my) ability to figure out whatever situation or context I am thrown into.

My Minerva experience exposed me to many divergent perspectives, in no small part thanks to the student body. This diversity highlighted that there are many pathways to meaning and successful solutions. To this day, I still find myself inspired by the boundary-pushing creativity and self-determinism of some Minervans.

Last but not least, Minerva’s focus on professional development greatly impacted my career. The Coaching & Talent Development Team (special thanks to Mateo Corby, Megan Christensen, Rachel Kim, and Hannah Newman from Coaching and Talent Development) encouraged best practices for connecting and reaching out that helped me land a momentous internship at Dalberg, as well as my jobs post-graduation. As a whole, my four years at Minerva imparted a sense of agency: in light of the complexity of what might be “good,” I can pursue what I feel is right and craft meaningful projects and pathways from that. 

Can you talk me through your Capstone project? In what ways do you think your Capstone work informs what you are doing now?

I ended up centering my Capstone project around an open-source project I was interested in, led by the World Policy Analysis Center. Our goal was to collect all the climate laws in the world by building web-scrapers to understand what works, what the gaps in climate policy are, and what might be valuable to replicate. During my last two years at Minerva, I was particularly curious to understand how the application of computer science and data science might advance environmental sustainability. So, I had been looking for projects out in the world that purported to be working on this. Embedded in the Silicon Valley narratives of “we are revolutionizing the world,” I was particularly skeptical of the tech industry’s ability to bring about meaningful change to real, global problems such as climate change, the migrant crisis, and the geopolitical violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo. I therefore decided to investigate the effectiveness of “tech” in addressing wicked problems by building evaluative frameworks and using the World Policy Analysis Center project as a case study.

My open-source contributions helped me land my current position. I was able to demonstrate a focus on good coding practices, open science, environmental policy-making, and meaningful impact. The critical thinking channeled in my Capstone shows up today both in my career choice and in my current work leading our organization’s Decolonizing Data Science program. When searching for a job, I only applied to organizations whose focus, impact, and choices I aligned with. At the Center for Data Science & Environment, I started and designed our program to avoid parachute science and interrogate tech solutionism by conducting critical, reflective exercises for each of our projects. While my Capstone had to be wrangled into a project that fit Minerva’s requirements, I feel incredibly lucky that my post-university professional life has allowed me to pursue and integrate approaches that feel both relevant and important.  

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Were there any Minerva experiences that inspired you to pursue this job?

I had limited research experience coming out of Minerva, which inspired me to pursue more after graduating and eventually led me to my position at UC Berkeley. While at Minerva, I ended up doing tech industry internships during each of my summers to help fund tuition. I also was not planning on going to grad school right after Minerva. After graduating, I was aware I did not know much about academic research beyond my classroom assignments. I felt it was worth exploring a lived experience in lab research before swearing off grad school for a couple of years. Thanks to a series of incredibly fortunate circumstances, the summer after graduating, I found myself hitchhiking a boat, a car, and an airplane in the San Juan Islands to Friday Harbor Labs (an island field station of the University of Washington).

There, I learned that I loved applied science and academic culture when grounded in inspiring, in-person, nature-filled settings. I rejoiced in the focus on learning for the sake of knowledge, the self-directionality offered by grad work, and the ability to spend time on what I care about – whether that is being outside collecting photos of endangered starfish for data analysis or having slow, reflective conversations with peers. It contrasted with my experiences with the tech industry’s hustle culture and sometimes out-of-touch rhetoric. This glimpse of what academic work could look like left me captivated. 

My colleague and new friend at Friday Harbor Labs encouraged me to apply for an exciting position shared by a Minerva graduate. I got the job and started research at MIT. I asked to work remotely to return to the San Francisco Bay and its waves, hills, and redwoods. I learned quickly that despite Minerva’s online learning platform, remote work was not for me. Without 150 peers going through the same thing in the same residence hall, it gets lonely and unmotivating. I started looking for other Bay Area-based opportunities and landed my dream job. The exploration and leaps of faith Minerva encouraged, especially through long summers and professional experiences we had to make do with, nurtured confidence that I could be part of the inaugural team at the Center for Data Science & Environment at Berkeley. 

‍If you were inspired by Magali’s story and are seeking a college experience that will teach you valuable pragmatic skills that will enable you to change the world, apply to join Minerva today.