Joana Simoes
Joana Simoes
ADVANCED DATA ANALYSIS PROFESSOR
Current position
Technical Lead at Starlab / Advanced Data Analysis Professor at Barcelona Technology School
Skills
Geospatial Analysis / Microservices / DevOps / Data stores / Object Oriented Programming / FOSS
Joana is the perfect blend of a data scientist and a software engineer, with Free and Open Source at the heart. Driven by curiosity and by all things spatial.
Although Joana has acquired a PhD in Geographical Information Systems (University College of London), her drive to solve “real-world” problems has led her to industry, an international organization and a research foundation. Through this career path, she had the amazing opportunity to work and live in different European cities (Lisbon, London, Rome and Barcelona) and to integrate international teams, which enabled Joana to embrace cultural diversity and has taught her to think “out-of-the-box”.
Although Joana has a passion for technology and has worked as a professional software engineer and architect for many years, she has often “changed hats” to become a data scientist, as she has a natural talent for “asking questions” and answering them with data.
Beyond being a developer, Joana cares a lot about the ethics of software, and how it can shape (and change) the world. Her involvement in the Free and Open Source movement, in particular in what concerns spatial technologies, has led her to become a charter member of the OSGeo foundation and the vice president of the Portuguese chapter of the OSGeo.
Although Joana has an extensive background in a wide range of technologies, she has always been interested in learning about new trends. Recently she has been diving into the challenges of handling Big Data data, and virtualising software in the cloud.
