Tracy Teal is a co-founder and the Executive Director of Data Carpentry. She received her PhD in Computation and Neural Systems from California Institute of Technology and was an NSF Postdoctoral Researcher in Biological Informatics. She worked at Michigan State University as a Research Specialist with the Institute for Cyber-Enabled Research and then as an Assistant Professor in Microbiology. While an assistant 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 the open source software and reproducible research communities, including as an Editor at the Journal for Open Source Software.