Welcome back to DSE: Max, Carolyn, and Evan!
At DSE, training the next generation of leaders on campus and beyond is core to our mission. At the start of the 2025-26 academic year, we’re thrilled to welcome back Max Taniguchi-King as our new Research Data Analyst, and Carolyn Zhuang and Evan Lingo as Undergraduate Data Science Interns!
Max previously interned with DSE on the Indigenous Environmental Stewardship team. His new role will help hone vegetation modeling and wildfire recovery tools, in partnership with the National Park Service. A recent graduate from UC Berkeley, Max has a double degree in Data Science and Environmental Earth Science. We asked Max a few questions about his previous experience at DSE and how the Research Data Analyst position will help grow his career.
DSE: What drew you to apply for the Data Analyst role?
MTK: This data analyst role is a marriage between data science, environmental science, impact-driven industry, and academic research — four communities I deeply value!
DSE: How do you think your internship with DSE will help prepare you for success in this role?
MTK: Being familiar with DSE’s mission and their support systems early on makes me excited for this new position. I’m also grateful to continue building the connections I’ve made at DSE, and already knowing the team will help me collaborate right away.
DSE: What are some of your takeaways from your internship with us?
MTK: I learned about the importance of partnerships with the IES team — following engineering best practices is always important, but building a trust-based and collaborative partnership with the community you’re working with is super valuable.
DSE: How does the Research Data Analyst position support your career goals and aspirations?
MTK: I love learning how the problem-solving capabilities of computation can be applied to environmental challenges. This role realizes this exploration with so many opportunities to learn while contributing to real-world environmental solutions.
Carolyn Zhuang and Evan Lingo are continuing their undergraduate internships with us this semester. Carolyn is a junior, double majoring in Applied Math and Computer Science. At DSE, she is an intern in the Indigenous Environmental Stewardship program working on the Landback project, focusing on webscraping, webcrawling, and using Retrieval-Augmented Generation to identify and score retrieved articles. She has previously worked on the Geo-LLM and Makaamkuk MCMC Modeling projects.
Evan Lingo is an undergraduate, majoring in Environmental Economics and Policy and intending to double major in Data Science. At DSE, he also suppporting the Indigenous Environmental Stewardship program, including a project led by Graduate Student Researcher, McKalee Steen. This project uses data science to analyze where and how Indigenous communities in the United States are reclaiming territory and the social and ecological impacts of those land acquisitions. In the future, Evan looks forward to spending his career working at the intersection of data science and environmental studies.
Welcome back, Max, Carolyn, and Evan! We’re looking forward to our continued work together.
