N. Cecilia Martinez-Gomez is an Associate Professor and a Bakar Faculty Fellow at UC Berkeley in the Plant and Microbial Biology department. Her research program is focused on microbial rare earth metabolism. For her work with rare earth elements, she received an NSF-CAREER award (from the Molecular and Cellular Biology Division) and has been funded by the Department of Energy, DOE-ARPA-E, the Department of Defense (Advanced Research Projects Agency), and the National Science Foundation NSF (Engineering division). Dr. Martinez-Gomez has a Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a postdoc in Chemical Engineering from the University of Washington, Seattle. She is also a co-founder of RareTerra, which focuses on recycling REE from electronic waste.