TCO Voices: Dylan Van Bramer

🎙️ TCO Voices: Hear from Dylan Van Bramer, a new addition to the TCO! ✨ Dylan joins the Toronto Climate Observatory as both a new PhD student in the University of Toronto’s Computer Science department and as a researcher eager to bridge computation and community. She reflected with us on what drew her to TCO, the questions inspiring her research, and what she most looks forward to this semester.

📖 How did your journey lead you to the University of Toronto for your doctoral studies? I studied computer science as an undergraduate at Cornell, where I became drawn to research as a way to bridge technical rigor with questions that matter in the world. UofT felt like the perfect place to explore these intersections, especially with the opportunity for joint supervision from professors working across different dimensions of machine learning and human-computer interaction.

🍁 What drew you to the Toronto Climate Observatory? The TCO is unique and distinctive in its hyperlocal orientation, grounding computational research in the realities of place and community – something we don’t see very often in computer science departments. It’s inspiring and exciting to witness traditionally inaccessible computational research being transformed into sites of consultation and co-creation with Toronto’s communities. This place-based focus, and the TCO’s mandate to reflect critically on ethics, systems, and forms of knowledge, is what really excites me about being part of this work.

💡 What research interests call out to you as you begin your PhD journey? I’m interested in environmental data and how we can use it responsibly in modeling. I care a lot about the interpretability of models – people need to meaningfully understand what algorithms are doing if they’re going to trust them, especially when those algorithms inform big decisions. I’m also curious about how environmental data is collected and used, and the biases that can shape those processes. Ultimately, I want to think about machine learning in a more conscious, thoughtful way, and bring together computational methods with community approaches to solve real problems.

👩‍💻 What are you most excited about this semester? I’m really looking forward to getting to know everyone at the TCO and learning about the wide range of projects underway, from pure climate science to work immersed deeply within the community. That breadth is energizing, because it means I’ll get to learn from many different methods and ways of thinking as I begin shaping my own research path. More than anything, I’m looking forward to the conversations, and being in dialogue with colleagues who are asking different, but complementary, questions about climate, computation, and community.