Profile 9: Greta Carrete Vega - Vizzuality

Greta Carrete Vega is a Scientist at Vizzuality (a blogpost about her on the Vizzuality webpage: https://blog.vizzuality.com/post/186028496111/hola-greta), a company that designs webpages showcasing data related to the climate crisis, biodiversity conservation and human rights. Before working at Vizzuality Greta completed her PhD on Forecasting biological invasions in terrestrial Antarctica at the Biodiversity and Macroecology Lab (http://olallalab.com) in Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (Madrid, Spain). Previously, she had completed a Bsc in Ecology at Université Paul Sabatier (Toulouse, France) and the Master Erasmus Mundus in Evolution Programme (https://www.evobio.eu/). 

• 1. What are the primary responsibilities and tasks in your current job?

  I am a Scientist in a team composed of web developers and graphic designers. I work with them giving scientific context to the data and we work together to code the data so it can be visualised in websites. 

• 2. How did you get this position?

  I learnt quite randomly about the position, I volunteered in a psychological study the company was running at Cambridge University and at the end I was told the company was advertising a job requiring skills that I had. 

• 3. Had you always intended to pursue a non-academic career? If not, what led you to it?

  I have always been open minded in relation to non-academic careers, for that reason I have always kept my Linkedin profile up to date. 

• 4. What would you have done differently to be better prepared for your current position? Which choices in the past were successful?

  I think I should have learnt before about GitHub and versioning scripts. 

  I have realised that through APECS I have had a few experiences that now are very useful at my new position like: digital meetings, working on google docs, working remotely with other people (time differences), working with people from other nationalities and using Slack (we use it in APECS Spain). 

  Keeping my Linkedin profile up to date was also very helpful, I learnt this was important a few years ago where I also learnt how to translate an academic CV into a non-academic one. I also kept an eye for any support information the graduate office was giving at the different institutions I visited during my PhD. 

• 5. Are there opportunities in your working place for candidates having a PhD degree?

  I think Vizzuality is currently composed by around 50 employees, of those, I think 6 we have previous experience as academics. To be a Scientist having a PhD is not a compulsory requirement, but they do a great job at making the transition from academia very easy.

• 6. Do you have any advice for working towards this career?

  In the job description they required knowledge on biodiversity conservation and some coding skills, so my advice would be to use as much as possible any coding language, the one I have most experience with is R and now I am also starting to use more python and javascript.