This program can only run with the active involvements of our volunteer community who share a passion for Open Research and inclusiveness in Open Science:
Mentees
Our mentees are life science researchers and bioinformaticians who are interested in contributing to Open Science projects and communities. In this program they will be supported by the organisers, mentors, experts, and other mentees in getting started with their journey as Open Life Scientists.
Our mentees will:
- gain a better understanding of Open Science and best practices
- fill gaps related to Open Science in their research
- learn to navigate their path in bioinformatics communities
- design equitable opportunities in their projects for the diverse community members
- increase their visibility as Open Life Scientist
- become Open Science ambassadors for their community
Becoming a mentee
A mentee dedicates about 2 hours per week to the program to attend cohort/mentor meetings and doing self-guided assignments.
Recruitment of the mentees will start in November. Stay tuned!
Mentors
Mentors work closely with participants to help further their Open Science skills and become ambassadors for Open Science practice, training and education in their communities. The mentors will be assigned to one or more projects (based on their availability) proposed in the program.
Our mentors are:
- contributors of one or several Open Science projects or communities
- interested in sharing the benefit they receive from the Open Science communities
- look for opportunities to gain mentoring experience
- love to share their enthusiasm about Open Science
- want to build their profile as Open Leaders
What do mentors do?
Mentors advise and inspire:
- Connect to people, programs
- Recommend resources, readings, experiences
- Feedback to consider
A mentor spend around 1 hour per week dedicated to the program, but also some time before the program to review applications.
They will meet their mentees every two weeks during the program and will attend group calls with other mentors to exchange notes and develop their mentoring skills further.
What are the benefits to be a mentor?
Our mentors will
- gain mentoring skills (active listening, effective questioning, giving feedback) via mentoring training
- learn to celebrate successes and approach challenges in mentoring
- connect with a community of mentors
- expand their knowledge on Open Science
Becoming a mentor
We are currently recruiting the mentors for the first round. Please reach out to one of the organizers if you are interested.
Our mentors
Andrew is an experimental psychologist and data scientist interested in open and reproducible research - he coordinates the Manchester Open Research Working Group and act as the UK Reproducibility Network representative at Manchester. All his teaching resources are open (content-wise 95% of my teaching involves teaching R at various levels) with all lecture and seminar content, workshops etc. available on GitHub. He also co-organises the Manchester R Users' Group, a fellow of the SSI and associate member of Carole Goble's eScience lab group. All the research programmes he leads now involve open data and open code - and everything he hopes is *hopefully* fully reproducible!
Working in the field of Climate modelling, and interested in Open Science, Open Innovation and ICT. Trying to facilitate access and use of Climate Data.
Daniela is a Neuroscientist with a passion for open, equitable, and transparent scholarship. She is a former Mozilla Fellow, and she now leads a project called PREreview to empower researchers to engage with each other and review preprints.
Fotis is an assistant research professor at the Institute of Applied Biosciences (INAB) at the Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH), with a primary focus on bioinformatics workflows and computational analysis of large bio-datasets using machine learning. He is trying to be an advocate of Open Science through my activities, both in the context of e-infrastructures (such as ELIXIR) as well as within the communities I am a part of (such as RDA). Additionally, he is trying to create a positive effect in the research culture within his country, both through increasing awareness of Open Science via training events, as well as by engaging with similarly-minded people (the nascent Carpentries community in Greece being an excellent example of this).
Hao is a computational ecologist at the University of Florida, working on methods for unraveling mechanisms among time series data. He participates in Mozilla OL (and other open science programs) because it combines my research focus and my interest in broadening inclusion and participation in STEM/academia/research.
Studied biochemistry, arctic ecology & geology, PhDed in diatom biofilms. Worked in tech support (Prezi), pharma-LIMS & OA data analysis.
Kaitlin is an assistant professor in the Science, Technology & Society department at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, NY USA. She is also extended program faculty in the Environmental Sciences Program.
Luis is Junior PI at Fudan University in Shanghai. His work in computational biology focus on the global microbiome. He has written several open source scientific software packages and organized and taught at multiple Software Carpentry workshops.
Mateusz is Research Software Community Manager at the Netherlands eScience Center. He has background in life sciences and have been working with bioinformatics data analysis and research software engineering. Past few years he has been involved in the Carpentries as an instructor, trainer and mentor (both in the mentoring subcommittee and mentoring teams).
Marius is a core Galaxy developer since 2015 and working full time on Galaxy since 2019. He has learned programming during my PhD in developmental biology, and quickly shifted towards data analysis and Galaxy development after that.
Naomi cares about improving transparency and equity in processes that affect how we produce, share and use knowledge, from the evaluation of research manuscripts to the design of everyday tools. As Associate Director of ASAPbio, she works to engage the research community and other stakeholders about the productive use of preprints for biology through convening, facilitation, community building and resource development. Her lens is influenced by my experiences: she is European, an OpenCon alumnus, MozFest facilitator, an advisor to PREreview, on the board of directors for Dryad, a CSCCE scientific community engagement fellow (#CEFP2019), organiser of #eLifeSprint 2018, and a human continually practising balance and kindness.
Nicola works at the Earlham Institute, where he manages and supports a Galaxy web server to run large-scale analyses in an accessible and reproducible way. He also collaborates on the open source development of the Galaxy platform and its tools. Nicola is a Carpentries Instructor and a Galaxy trainer. He is currently the Technical Coordinator for ELIXIR-UK.
Patricia is currently a Research Data Specialist working at the Digital Curation Centre at the University of Edinburgh working on the FAIRsFAIR project aiming at fostering Fair Data Practices in Europe. Before joining the DCC, she was the Research Repository Advisor at the University of Birmingham and have previously worked as a data librarian at CERN's Scientific Information Service working closely with software developers to deliver data and code sharing solutions. She loves collaborating openly and making projects welcoming to new comers.
Software Engineering Student at University of Brasília, open source developer, python programmer, functional languages lover!
Venkata is a Bioinformatician, and a Senior Researcher at Bioinformatics core facility, and Deputy Head of the BioMedical Informatics Department, LCSB, University of Luxembourg. He is also Technical Coordinator (TeC) of ELIXIR-Luxembourg Node and CTO & Co-founder ITTM S.A. Luxembourg. He joined University of Luxembourg in January 2013 and is having around two decades of working experience in various bioinformatics fields including Data Integration and Knowledge Management; Clinical and Translational Data Curation, Harmonisation, Integration and Analysis; Dynamic Visual Analytics; Text-mining; Deep learning and advanced machine learning technologies. Before joining LCSB, between 2004-2012 he worked as a Senior Bioinformatics Scientist at the EMBL, Heidelberg. Before EMBL he worked as a Bioinformatics Scientist at LION bioscience AG, Heidelberg. He is an associate editor of Frontiers in Systems Biology, co-chair of ISCB Education Committee involved in the organisation of several conferences, workshops, code/data hackathons.
Toby manages EMBL Bio-IT, a community of bioinformaticians/computational biologists at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany. They do a lot of training, in- and outreach, and provide a bunch of cool resources to help our community members connect, collaborate, and do their research openly and effectively. He is also quite active in The Carpentries, as an instructor, instructor trainer, discussion host, mentor, etc.
Renato is a biologist by training with a passion for computational work. Love learning about as much as teaching. Open source junky. Certified computer geek.
A mentor for many previous waves of open leaders, who is currently studying for their PhD at UCL.
Experts
Experts will be invited to join cohort calls or individual mentorship calls to share their experience and expertise during the program.
Our experts are:
- motivated Open Life Scientists
- understand and advocate the value of working openly
- look for opportunities to support or give back to the research community
- enjoy sharing their resources to facilitate others work
- develop and teach skills collaboratively in the community
- want to gain/improve leadership skills through their engagements in this program
Becoming an expert
Experts may be invited to:
- give a ~20 minute talk at one of our cohort calls, which happen every two weeks.
- be interviewed by the organisers (~15 minutes)
- invited by mentor-mentee pair to share their expert consultation on certain projects. (~30 minutes)
We are currently recruiting the experts for the first round.
Our experts
Athina is a neuroscientist, with a background in electrical and computer engineering. Her research combines computational and electrophysiological techniques to study human cognition.
Aidan has worked in life science research in both the wet lab, and as a bioinformatician. Since 2010 his focus has been on developing training and community for researchers, while managing a range of life-science related networks and projects. In 2020 he will be working for EMBO Solutions GmbH as a trainer for leadership for researchers. He is an allocishet abled middle-class white man, and wants to do as much as he can to promote a more inclusive society and academy.
Andrew is an experimental psychologist and data scientist interested in open and reproducible research - he coordinates the Manchester Open Research Working Group and act as the UK Reproducibility Network representative at Manchester. All his teaching resources are open (content-wise 95% of my teaching involves teaching R at various levels) with all lecture and seminar content, workshops etc. available on GitHub. He also co-organises the Manchester R Users' Group, a fellow of the SSI and associate member of Carole Goble's eScience lab group. All the research programmes he leads now involve open data and open code - and everything he hopes is *hopefully* fully reproducible!
Over the past 5 years committed to ongoing improvement of research software practice through training and community engagement work in UK's Software Sustainability Institute and ELIXIR EU Life Sciences Infrastructure Project. Driving the training trends forward by helping communities roll out new training strategies and curricula for research in individual domains. Maintained UK's pivotal role within the international Carpentries community delivering Software, Data, Library and HPC Carpentry training, drove key strategic decisions and handled international collaborations and outreach with training communities. Organised CarpentryConnect Manchester 2019 for over 70 attendees from the Carpentry and other training communities. Carpentries instructor (since 2014) and instructor trainer (since 2017).
Anna is an ex-macroecologists who fell in love with R and open data science. Now a Research Software Engineer at the University of Sheffield, she is helping scientists do more with their code and data and build more open collaborative communities.
Anne currently works at Oswald Cruz foundation with the development of a bottom up open data policy. She is also part of a research group dedicated to open science themes, especially social innovations.
Daniela is a Neuroscientist with a passion for open, equitable, and transparent scholarship. She is a former Mozilla Fellow, and she now leads a project called PREreview to empower researchers to engage with each other and review preprints.
Fotis is an assistant research professor at the Institute of Applied Biosciences (INAB) at the Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH), with a primary focus on bioinformatics workflows and computational analysis of large bio-datasets using machine learning. He is trying to be an advocate of Open Science through my activities, both in the context of e-infrastructures (such as ELIXIR) as well as within the communities I am a part of (such as RDA). Additionally, he is trying to create a positive effect in the research culture within his country, both through increasing awareness of Open Science via training events, as well as by engaging with similarly-minded people (the nascent Carpentries community in Greece being an excellent example of this).
Research Fellow at the Center for Research & Interdisciplinarity in Paris. Co-Founder of openSNP, Director of Research at Open Humans. Does all things community science and loves open(science|culture|.*)
Hao is a computational ecologist at the University of Florida, working on methods for unraveling mechanisms among time series data. He participates in Mozilla OL (and other open science programs) because it combines my research focus and my interest in broadening inclusion and participation in STEM/academia/research.
Biomedical scientist and science communicator interested in building effective outreach strategies for equitable access of research outputs.
Demitra is the Editorial Community Manager at F1000 which she joined in 2017 after working in journal development at Springer Nature. She is a strong advocate of Open Research and engages with the research community to raise awareness of the F1000 publishing platforms. In her role, she supports the development of funder-specific platforms, particularly Wellcome Open Research. These platforms aim to transform the way science is communicated and provides researchers with innovative solutions for how their research is shared, used and reused.
Jason is a life scientist who spends most of his time working to help researchers adopt computational practices in research and education
Joel is a Biomedical Engineering PhD student who enjoys learning and teaching how to better understand data (and thus the world around us!). He is also passionate about openness, reproducibility, and data visualization, both within science and in general.
Kari is the Senior Director of Equity and Assessment for The Carpentries, Executive Director of the Engineer Like a Girl after-school program, and a Zumba Fitness Instructor! Kari's background is mechanical engineering, and she earned a PhD in Engineering Education from The Ohio State University. Her doctoral research explored self-efficacy of underrepresented engineering students. After completing a post-doc in the Engineering Fundamentals Department at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, she was hired to lead The Carpentries assessment efforts. In her current role, her focus is developing programs through the lens of equity, and setting strategic efforts around assessment that inform The Carpentries curriculum and other initiatives.
Studied biochemistry, arctic ecology & geology, PhDed in diatom biofilms. Worked in tech support (Prezi), pharma-LIMS & OA data analysis.
Caleb is a 19/20 Mozilla Fellow and a Bioinformatician, interested in teaching, open science, reproducibility, machine learning, FAIR Genomics, and community building.
Kirstie is a research fellow at the Alan Turing Institute (London, UK) and senior research associate in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge. Her work covers a broad range of interests and methods, but the driving principle is to improve the lives of neurodivergent people and people with mental health conditions. Dr Whitaker uses magnetic resonance imaging to study child and adolescent brain development and participatory citizen science to educate non-autistic people about how they can better support autistic friends and colleagues. She is the lead developer of The Turing Way, an openly developed educational resource to enable more reproducible data science. Kirstie is a passionate advocate for making science 'open for all' by promoting equity and inclusion for people from diverse backgrounds, and by changing the academic incentive structure to reward collaborative working. She is the chair of the Turing Institute's Ethics Advisory Group, a Fulbright scholarship alumna and was a 2016/17 Mozilla Fellow for Science. Kirstie was named, with her collaborator Petra Vertes, as a 2016 Global Thinker by Foreign Policy magazine.
Kaitlin is an assistant professor in the Science, Technology & Society department at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, NY USA. She is also extended program faculty in the Environmental Sciences Program.
Luis is Junior PI at Fudan University in Shanghai. His work in computational biology focus on the global microbiome. He has written several open source scientific software packages and organized and taught at multiple Software Carpentry workshops.
Mateusz is Research Software Community Manager at the Netherlands eScience Center. He has background in life sciences and have been working with bioinformatics data analysis and research software engineering. Past few years he has been involved in the Carpentries as an instructor, trainer and mentor (both in the mentoring subcommittee and mentoring teams).
Marius is a core Galaxy developer since 2015 and working full time on Galaxy since 2019. He has learned programming during my PhD in developmental biology, and quickly shifted towards data analysis and Galaxy development after that.
Physicist, Teacher, Mozillian
Naomi cares about improving transparency and equity in processes that affect how we produce, share and use knowledge, from the evaluation of research manuscripts to the design of everyday tools. As Associate Director of ASAPbio, she works to engage the research community and other stakeholders about the productive use of preprints for biology through convening, facilitation, community building and resource development. Her lens is influenced by my experiences: she is European, an OpenCon alumnus, MozFest facilitator, an advisor to PREreview, on the board of directors for Dryad, a CSCCE scientific community engagement fellow (#CEFP2019), organiser of #eLifeSprint 2018, and a human continually practising balance and kindness.
Nicola works at the Earlham Institute, where he manages and supports a Galaxy web server to run large-scale analyses in an accessible and reproducible way. He also collaborates on the open source development of the Galaxy platform and its tools. Nicola is a Carpentries Instructor and a Galaxy trainer. He is currently the Technical Coordinator for ELIXIR-UK.
Paula is an Open Science advocate her passions are data management, data analytics, research, and diversity. She is a computer scientist who has worked on data intensive bioinformatics and data management. She has also collaborated on community projects such as The Carpentries, rOpenSci, RLadies. Currently she works for the National Imaging Facility in Australia.
Patricia is currently a Research Data Specialist working at the Digital Curation Centre at the University of Edinburgh working on the FAIRsFAIR project aiming at fostering Fair Data Practices in Europe. Before joining the DCC, she was the Research Repository Advisor at the University of Birmingham and have previously worked as a data librarian at CERN's Scientific Information Service working closely with software developers to deliver data and code sharing solutions. She loves collaborating openly and making projects welcoming to new comers.
Giuseppe was a researcher in bioinformatics and teacher of programming in an international MSc degree. After moving to industry, he is focusing on devops, reproducible science and the creation of databases and tools for research institutions, hospitals and companies. Wikimedian at heart, he loves when knowledge is open and shareable.
Rachael is a Research Software Community Manager for the Software Sustainability Institute and Open Science advocate at the University of Manchester. She is passionate about openness, transparency, reproducibility, wellbeing and inclusion in research. She was a project lead in Round 4 and Mentor and Cohort Host in Round 5 of Mozilla Open Leaders, and organises a women in data meetup group in Manchester called HER+Data MCR.
Venkata is a Bioinformatician, and a Senior Researcher at Bioinformatics core facility, and Deputy Head of the BioMedical Informatics Department, LCSB, University of Luxembourg. He is also Technical Coordinator (TeC) of ELIXIR-Luxembourg Node and CTO & Co-founder ITTM S.A. Luxembourg. He joined University of Luxembourg in January 2013 and is having around two decades of working experience in various bioinformatics fields including Data Integration and Knowledge Management; Clinical and Translational Data Curation, Harmonisation, Integration and Analysis; Dynamic Visual Analytics; Text-mining; Deep learning and advanced machine learning technologies. Before joining LCSB, between 2004-2012 he worked as a Senior Bioinformatics Scientist at the EMBL, Heidelberg. Before EMBL he worked as a Bioinformatics Scientist at LION bioscience AG, Heidelberg. He is an associate editor of Frontiers in Systems Biology, co-chair of ISCB Education Committee involved in the organisation of several conferences, workshops, code/data hackathons.
Renato is a biologist by training with a passion for computational work. Love learning about as much as teaching. Open source junky. Certified computer geek.
Organizers
We are graduates, mentors, and hosts of various Mozilla Open Leaders cohorts, in which we have gained expertise in the technical and culture track.
Bérénice is a bioinformatician (post-doc in the Freiburg Galaxy Team), analyzing biological data and developing tools for data analysis, mainly via Galaxy.
Bérénice is also passionate about training, regularly giving workshops (data analysis, tool development, etc). She started and still co-leads the Galaxy Training Material project. She is a co-deputy training coordinator for ELIXIR Germany (de.NBI), and a founder of Street Science Community, an outreach program.
Malvika is a Community Outreach Coordinator for the Bio-IT community at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Germany.
She is a Co-Deputy Training Coordinator for ELIXIR Germany, a Software Sustainability Institute Fellow (2019), a board member of Open Bioinformatics Foundation (since July 2019), and a contributing member of The Carpentries community.
From January 2020, she will take the role of Community Manager for The Turing Way Project at The Alan Turing Institute, UK.
Through her work, she promotes inclusiveness in Open Science communities.
Yo is a Software Sustainability Institute Fellow, founder of Code is Science, EngD student at the University of Manchester studying the effects of community and usabilty on open source software, editor for the PLOS Open Source Toolkit, board member of the Open Bioinformatics Foundation, and a software developer at the University of Cambridge, working on an open source biological data warehouse called InterMine.
We also participate in a wide range of activities in different international communities of practice in the life sciences:
- ELIXIR (European bioinformatics network)
- Galaxy
- The Carpentries
- Software Sustainability Institute (SSI)
- Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF)
- Mozilla
Our values
We have high ethical standards, including:
- Education: Educate scientists about open science
- Transparency: Emphasize transparency and the sharing of resources, material, knowledge and experiences
- Open science: Promote citizen science and decentralized access to science
- Modesty: Know you don’t know everything
- Community: Carefully listen to any concerns and questions and respond honestly
- Respect: Respect humans and all living systems
- Responsibility: Recognize the complexity and dynamics of life science and research and our responsibility towards them
Partners and sponsors
This program is made possible thanks to our partners and sponsors!
de.NBI (the German Network for Bioinformatics Infrastructure) is supporting Bérénice and Malvika through in-kind contribution.
The program organisers are associated with ELIXIR member institutes and several mentors and experts are from different ELIXIR nodes.
EMBL Bio-IT is a community project of which Malvika is a coordinator of.
This program is developed as a part of Mozilla Open Leaders X (MOLx) chohort. Thanks to our champion Abby (Abigail Cabunoc Mayes) from Mozilla Foundation for providing support in designing this program.
This program will be supported by SSI fellowship offered to Malvika from 2019-2020. Yo is a SSI fellow from the previous year.
Turing Way will partner with this program to build mentor-mentee relationships in their community.
University of Manchester
The University of Manchester is supporting Yo for her Ph.D. research.
Get involved
If you think you can help then please check out our contributors’ guidelines and our project board.
Please note that it’s very important to us that we maintain a positive and supportive environment for everyone who wants to participate. When you join us we ask that you follow our code of conduct in all interactions both on and offline.