Marcela Alfaro Córdoba

Educator and Applied Statistician

Associate Professor of Teaching
Department of Statistics, UC Santa Cruz

2025-10-12

Hello! 👋 I’m Marcela

🎓 Why is my title different?

Associate Professor of Teaching at UC is a permanent faculty role (Senate Faculty with tenure) that emphasizes:

• Teaching excellence: Leading courses at all levels
• Curriculum innovation: Designing and developing new programs and courses
• Student mentorship: Guiding undergraduate and graduate students in research and career development
• Collaborative scholarship: Contributing to applied research projects and pedagogical scholarship
• Academic leadership: Serving on committees, building departmental programs, and contributing to the university mission

This track offers job security and faculty status while focusing on education and applied work rather than independent research programs.

🎓 My Journey

• Started with a PhD at NC State, specializing in spatial-temporal statistics and functional data analysis, then immediately put theory into practice—working on everything from climate models to veterinary medicine

• At the University of Costa Rica, wore many hats: teacher, mentor, and embedded statistician collaborating with teams in biophysics, climate science, and environmental research

• Currently at UC Santa Cruz, doing what I love most: teaching the next generation, building innovative programs, solving real scientific problems as an applied statistician, and mentoring students at all levels

🌍 Ongoing projects on Applied Statistics

• Functional Data Analysis of Spectrophotometry. Collaborators: Dr. Rebeca Mora and Dr. Juan Carlos Delgado from the University of Costa Rica.

• Design and analysis of experiments for enzymatic hydrolysis (sugar production) of two sorghum varieties. Collaborators: Dr. Ana Zuleta and Dr. Mari Chinn from Oklahoma State University.

• Modeling longitudinal count data to quantify treatment and sex effects on hydra sexual differentiation patterns. Collaborators: Dr. Aide Macias-Muñoz and Kelso Cochran from EEB at UCSC.

What I do:

• Collaborate with researchers across disciplines to address complex data analysis and statistical challenges.

  • What you could do: participate as a statistical collaborator in future projects like these ones.

📚 Teaching & Innovation

• Education innovation reimagining how we teach statistics

  • Ongoing: 3C project with UC Riverside and UC Irvine to test worksheets based on sense of belonging and success in intro to stats classes. Collaborators: teaching professors in statistics from UCI and UCR. Open to students interested in carrying the in class data collection at UCSC and analysis.

  • Ongoing: LSS project to measure impact of tutoring in stats and other courses on campus, before and after the pandemic. Collaborators: LSS, ALEEC, undergraduate student working on her honors thesis.

• Program building contributed to the creation of new Statistics & Data Science degree at UCSC

  • Ongoing: program approval

📚 Teaching & Innovation

• Course developer redesigned STAT 5 with Sho Kawano, and create STAT 17 with Prof. Draper, created data science methods (STAT 155).

  • Ongoing: STAT 7 modifications requested by PBSci. Collaborators: PBSci curriculum committe, open to more students :)

  • Ongoing: Data and Society course funding. Collaborators: Prof. Amy Argenal.

📚 Teaching & Innovation

• TA support serving as a link between Teaching and Learning Center and Stats department for TA professional development.

  • Ongoing: Graduate Pedagogy Fellows. Collaborators: TLC, Antonio Aguirre, Andrew Le, open to more students :)

  • Ongoing: STAT 200 teaching sessions and TA Wiki. Collaborators: TLC, Antonio Aguirre, Andrew Le.

🔬 Project: ReproStats Lab

The idea: A space where students learn by doing

• Students reproduce complex statistical studies
• Learn the implementation of new statistical methods
• Connect data ethics with reproducibility
• Train responsible producers of research

The mission: Bridge the gap between learning statistics and practicing good science

• Ongoing: Collaborators: Jason Teng (PhD student Stats), Mrudula Reddy Atla (MSc student CSE), open to more students to scale collaborations with grad students from other departments.

💡 My Mission

Making data science and statistics:

OPEN • ACCESSIBLE • REPRODUCIBLE • RESPONSIBLE

Get in Touch! 🚀

Website: malfaro2.github.io

Email: macordob@ucsc.edu

Calendar: Calendar Appointment

Interested in:

• Statistical collaborations
• Research Reproducibility
• Data science and statistics education
• Open Science initiatives

Let’s collaborate!

Whether you’re looking for:

• An applied project to develop your statistical skills and learn best practices for scientific collaboration

• A project focused on statistics education

• Opportunities for TA professional development.

• An opportunity to advance knowledge around open science and reproducibility

Note: While I’m working on other projects: SoRDS (Research Data Science Schools), Women in STEM project at UC of Costa Rica, LatinR and other R groups, RDA (Research Data Alliance) working groups, among others, these are not really projects where I could add students. However, if you are interested in knowing more about them, please reach out.

Thanks!

Questions?