Tracy Teal is the Executive Director of The Carpentries and a co-founder of Data Carpentry. She received her PhD in Computation and Neural Systems from California Institute of Technology and was an Assistant Professor in Microbiology at Michigan State University. While a professor, she saw researchers' need for effective data skills to effectively and reproducibly conduct research, and co-founded Data Carpentry to scale data training along with data production. She is involved in open source software and reproducible research, including as an Editor at the Journal for Open Source Education and senior personnel in the US Research Software Sustainability Institute.