Speaker - Alex Marden

Alex Marden began using open source software to facilitate international fieldwork and collaboration while studying wildfire ecology in the Kalahari Basin. He incorporates that experience into teaching numerous open source software-based courses and workshops at the University of Texas at Austin. As the GIS and Geospatial Data Coordinator at the UT Libraries, he supports the GIS needs of the university community and works to make geospatial data broadly available and accessible. In his role as an Open Geospatial Software Specialist with the UT Open Source Program Office (UT-OSPO), he focuses on open-source software training and best practice documentation. Additionally, he is the current Chair of the newly formed UT-OSPO User Advisory Group, which aims to effectively serve and foster a community of open-source focused researchers. He received a PhD in Geography from UT Austin in 2024, where his research focused on spatiotemporally complex climate-disturbance linkages and how scale relates to the observability of those linkages.