Geology provides a language for understanding the Earth. Stories from the planet’s past are locked in the rocks and landscape. But others are hard to reveal, hidden in troves of data.
No one knows this better than UC Davis Ph.D. alums and married couple Barbara Wortham and Chad Trexler.
A climate risk specialist, Wortham deals with multidimensional datasets to develop climate risk assessments for her clients. In his work as a research geologist for the USGS Earthquake Science Center, Trexler studies datapoints from past earthquakes to help develop seismic hazard models pertaining to future earthquake risks.
Neither of these things are possible without coding.
“Geologists are naturally super collaborative,” said Wortham, who graduated in 2021 with a Ph.D. degree in earth and planetary sciences. “We’re all in the field together all the time with big groups and trying to solve big problems. Personally, I think code is another way to collaborate with people.”
Why coding is essential for geology and earth science students
The increasing necessity of coding in the geosciences inspired Wortham and Trexler to create a Geology Coding Bootcamp for students in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences (EPS) at UC Davis.
Launched last May, the program currently hosts 11 students spanning the undergraduate and graduate levels. Through the program, students gain access to the pro-level of Codecademy, a website that offers coding classes and certificates in multiple languages with a “go at your own pace” structure.
“When Babs had this idea and came to me with it, the thing that I thought was exciting about it was this potential to help students get coding experience earlier because then they can hit the ground running,” said Trexler, who graduated in 2018 with a Ph.D. degree in earth and planetary sciences.
Filling a critical gap in earth and planetary sciences education
Wortham learned about Codecademy while studying for her doctoral degree. Her Ph.D. supervisor Isabel Montañez, a Distinguished Professor of earth and planetary sciences, paid for Wortham to take the classes necessary for a data science certification.
“It ended up being the thing that defined my ability to shift from academia to the consulting space because I had that data science background,” Wortham said. “But I noticed, while we were students at UC Davis, that coding wasn’t regularly taught in courses.”
“We often tried to solve problems using different coding packages or software as we needed them, and whatever faculty used, but it wasn’t something we were regularly trained in,” she added. “That’s why I was really inspired to help fund some of that at EPS.”
Trexler’s academic experience was similar. He taught himself how to use MATLAB and Python, using the skills to plot earthquake locations on a map and create age models based on rock layer data from paleoseismic trenches.
“It wasn’t until the last couple of years that I started to sort of learn the background part of coding, like actually learning how the language works” Trexler said. “It helps so much.”
Overcoming coding anxiety
For first year earth and planetary sciences Ph.D. student Lucy Bates, the prospect of coding was a source of anxiety. The Geology Coding Bootcamp gave her an opportunity to overcome that anxiety. Through Codecademy, she learned and better familiarized herself with the R and Python programming languages.
“Codecademy made coding very accessible to someone like me who had a general angst towards coding,” said Bates, who is a member of the Ocean Climate Lab run by Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences Tessa Hill. “I found the real-time feedback helpful during the learning process. If you made a syntax mistake, the program would show you how and why it was incorrect and how to correct it.”
The skills proved useful in Bates’ classes. During her first quarter at UC Davis, she enrolled in classes that used R and Python. Before the start of the quarter, she used Codecademy to brush up on the programming languages.
“This greatly eased my anxiety surrounding coding,” Bates said. “Knowing that I had a rich resource available at any time was reassuring and I ended up doing well in both classes that quarter.”
Bates said the coding skills will be transferable to her paleo and modern oceanography research, specifically when it comes to data analyses.
“My research will develop a multi-site environmental history of the San Francisco Bay over the past 5,000 years,” she said. “Paleoclimate records of Northern California and the San Francisco Bay estuary suggest a wider range of climate conditions that are beyond what we have witnessed in the past 200 years of the measured record.”
One year later: tracking the bootcamp’s impact
This May, Wortham and Trexler, who live in San Jose, will visit UC Davis to check in on the program they started.
“We haven’t gotten any formal feedback, but I am friends with a few faculty members in the department who have students who are doing it,” Wortham said. “They’ve seen a huge improvement in their ability to code, which is great.”
At the end of many Codecademy certification programs, students can develop capstone projects that harness lessons from the courses. According to Wortham and Trexler, the capstone projects often resemble projects or problems encountered in the professional world.
“I actually got a conference publication out of it from doing that work as part of my Ph.D. with a collaborator,” Wortham said.
Wortham and Trexler are excited to learn about the students’ capstone projects when they visit in May.
“We’re going to redo the bootcamp again for next year, so hopefully students will have heard about it from their friends and have the opportunity to apply,” Wortham said.
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