At Tetra Tech Coffey we are fortunate to have so many wonderful, inspiring female engineers and scientists, collaborating and sharing knowledge to benefit our clients and industry. Maritza Kolega from our Adelaide team is one such leader, committed to achieving gender equality and empowering women and girls to pursue careers in science.
Maritza is a Senior Associate Geospatial Consultant and South Australian Regional Lead at Tetra Tech Coffey. Supporting a variety of clients and industry, Maritza works predominately in the approvals space for large linear infrastructure and mining projects; where her specialist work aims to harness the power of big data, turning it into meaningful visualisation and mapping to help people see the world ‘in a new way’. This #womeninscienceday we asked Maritza for her insights from her career.
What drove you to specialise in GIS, Digital and Design?
I’ve always loved maps, science and design so GIS is a perfect fit. It’s all about combining complex information in a visually engaging way, enabling anyone to quickly see how phenomena and features interact and what levers we can pull to make changes to the world around us.
What has been a career highlight project so far?
Over the course of my career, I’ve mapped where seals populations swim to inform the design of marine parks, popped my head out the top of a wind turbine when mapping as-built assets and have trained local counterparts around the globe to help support land rights initiatives. Being a curious person by nature, my career highlight is definitely working in the GIS field! I genuinely enjoy working with a variety ofspecialists from land tenure to electricity distribution design to social impact assessments and everything in-between. Each day I get to learn something new while curating and analysing all types of data to create a story/picture (a map!) of how place ties the threads together.
What is your hope for women entering your field in the future?
The technology in this space evolves quickly and the intuitiveness of place as a means to understand and visualise our world continues to grow the pervasiveness of GIS in all sectors. My hope is that women and girls wanting a career in STEAM look towards GIS as a preferred option to build the kind of career they want.
Connect with Maritza Kolega at Maritza.Kolega@tetratech.com