Projects & Participants

Andrew West (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Participants join this program with a project that they either are already working on or want to develop during this program.

For this round of the OLS program, we are happy to have 52 participants with 32 projects.

Projects

Practical Guide to Reproducibility in Bioinformatics

By: Sangram Sahu

Mentored by: Hans-Rudolf Hotz

Status: graduated

Reproducibility in life science always been in debate. Althogly lately standard practices have adopted in different aspects, sometimes these might not practically applicable by the end researcher. Reproducibility practices need to be used by all, then only it will be successful in both ends (research producer and research reader). To bridge this gap, a lot of practical training is required. This is where this project comes in picture. Here we aim of creating training materials for doing reproducible research in a more practical and application-oriented way with a specific focus on niche areas of respective research (for now bioinformatics as a starting point). Not only limited to materials, as well as virtual training by promoting the practuce of creating and sharing of Computational Environment and Analysis in a reproducible manner with systems in scaling.

Mapping Science using Open Scholarship

By: Stefan Gaillard

Mentored by: Malvika Sharan, Yo Yehudi

I want to work out a way to use data visualization to map the current state of scientific knowledge within the life sciences. Some literature on mapping science already exists, but most was written before the machine learning revolution. The more contemporary literature suffers from other mistakes, such as flawed comparisons of studies (using the same terminology in different manners) and, most importantly, not all scientific research is easily available. Thus, Open Science should be an integral component of any effort to map scientific knowledge. In this project, I aim to outline which Open Science practices currently exist that facilitate the mapping of science, which Open Science practices are needed to facilitate the mapping of science and how a prototype for a collaborative effort to map science could look like.

Creating community awareness of open science practices in phytolith research

By: Emma Karoune

Mentored by: Yvan Le Bras

Status: graduated

I have been conducting my own research to assess the state of data sharing in phytolith analysis. The results show that data sharing practices are minimal (articles are currently being written!). Therefore, I am aware that my discipline needs to focus on open science practices to develop more transparent and robust methodologies. I want to raise awareness of the need for open science practices, initially focusing on data sharing. This will involve distributing my current research findings widely through blogs and conference talks, and these efforts will enable the formation of community connections to initiate a working group for open science in my field. There are currently working groups for nomenclature and morphometrics in phytolith analysis as part of the International Phytolith Society. Initial efforts of the working group would be to investigate the best ways to share data, developing resources/training opportunities for students and early career researchers, and recommending/publishing guidelines for colleagues to follow.

Synthetic Biology Chassis Toolkit for Public Domain Use

By: Stephen Klusza

Mentored by: Anita Bröllochs

Status: graduated

A synthetic biology platform that is compatible with existing and future public-domain biotechnologies in the Biosafety-Level -1 (BSL-1) organism Bacillus subtilis. Bacillus subtilis has the ability to secrete biomaterials outside of the cell and also undergoes sporulation under certain conditions, which provides a stable way of storing DNA at room temperature without a need for refrigeration. Despite the tremendous progress in synthetic biology and biomanufacturing industries, most innovations are patented with various restrictions on use and impedes global access and use of these tools. A synthetic biology toolkit that exclusively uses technologies in the public domain is the first step towards providing scientists and non-scientists the tools to conduct science and create valuable biomaterials for their communities without restriction.

Creating a single pipeline for metagenome classification

By: Muhammet Celik

Mentored by: Mallory Freeberg

Status: graduated

Metagenomics has been increasingly becoming very important in studies of human and animal health. It has become clear that bacteria in and on our bodies are very significant. Thus there is a big boost in science society who are willing to study metagenomics. When we want to do downstream analysis in our microbial community, the first step is to find out about our community, what the community ultimately looks like. My idea is that benchmark the state of the art tools (such as Kraken2, Centrifuge and CLARK) and create a single pipeline that will produce a single pdf file with cutoff-significance-sensitivity values for each tool. Later we can set that pipeline on web-based system that would make the researchers easier for the scientists.

Chronic Learning

By: Bailey Harrington

Mentored by: Piraveen Gopalasingam

Status: graduated

Chronic Learning is an open resource for academics and individuals who are trying to teach or learn something new; the scope is not limited to science. The project currently consists of a WordPress site (unlaunched), a Dropbox for material storage, and a Twitter account for dissemination. I own the copyright for all of the materials, and they are free to use for academic purposes, such as lecture slides or handouts. The materials are made up of a mixture of graphical abstracts, tutorials, and reference pdfs; I hope to incorporate more formats, such as videos, as well.

Open Innovation in Life Sciences

By: Joyce Kao, Christina Ambrosi

Mentored by: Aidan Budd

Status: graduated

Open Innovation in Life Sciences is an open science organization that promotes the practice of open science in the Zurich-area life science research community. We are a bottom-up approach focusing on early career researchers (ECRs) that complements the Swiss national and institutional top-down open science initiatives. We are currently establishing an official Swiss association in collaboration with Life Science Zurich and expanding our program to include open science workshops/courses for ECRs and public lectures to complement our annual conference and keep the discussion on open science active all year round. The association will be operated by ECRs working with a board of academic and industry leaders thus it doubles as a career training program adding hands-on experience of practicing soft skills (e.g. teamwork, communication, etc.) and learning non-scientific expertise (e.g. project management, budgeting, advertising, etc.) to enhance traditional Ph.D. and Postdoctoral training.

Using collective action to change cultural norms and drive progress in the life sciences

By: Cooper Smout

Mentored by: Luis Pedro Coelho, Lilian Juma

Status: graduated

Open Science practices have the potential to benefit everyone in the life science community (and broader society), but their adoption is limited by incentive structures that reward ‘fast’ and unreliable science at the individual level. ‘Crowd-acting’ platforms (e.g., Kickstarter, Collaction) can overcome such collective action problems by organising ‘pledges’ for a particular behaviour, which are only acted on if and when a predetermined critical mass of support is met. By protecting individuals’ interests until such time that they have the support of their community, crowd-acting platforms can thus resolve the collective action problem and increase the uptake of the beneficial behaviour in question. Similarly, Project Free Our Knowledge aims to organise collective action in the global research community. Researchers can create and sign campaigns asking their peers to adopt a new behaviour, but only act on that pledge if a certain threshold of support is met (e.g., 1000 signatures). If and when the threshold is reached, everyone who has signed that campaign will be listed on the website and directed to carry out the new behaviour in unison, with the protection of their peers.

Developing the Research Software and Systems Engineering Community to support Life Sciences in Africa

By: Peter van Heusden, Eugene de Beste

Mentored by: Mesfin Diro, Raniere Silva

Bioinformatics and other computational life sciences (e.g. disease modelling) rely on computing infrastructure built and maintained by software engineers and sysadmins/systems engineers. The RSSE Africa (Research Software & Systems Engineers) forum was established last year just prior to the ASBCB conference to provide a home for people whose main contribution to research is software and computing systems. The aim for 2020 is to grow the project in terms of visibility and participation.

Growing the Galaxy Community

By: Beatriz Serrano-Solano

Mentored by: Dave Clements

Status: graduated

Galaxy is an open-source framework that enables scientists to perform computational biology analysis. A worldwide community supports the Galaxy project providing tools, workflows, computational resources and training materials in many different scientific areas. At the beginning of September 2020, I’ll be starting a new position at the University of Freiburg to help with the community management within the European Galaxy team. European Galaxy community has grown both in number and fields, standing in need of coordination across several countries that need to work collaboratively to achieve common goals. My new role will include the responsibility of coordinating the European Galaxy and scientific community as well as strengthening the relationship with the Australian community, helping build the Asian and African communities, and event organisation around Bioconda, BioContainers and Galaxy. With this personal project, I would like to advance my community building and project management skill while enhancing the connection with the communities outside Europe.

Global land-use and land-cover data under historical, current, and future climatic conditions for ecologists

By: Tainá Rocha

Mentored by: Bruno Soares, Yvan Le Bras

Status: graduated

Land-Use Land-cover (LULC) data are important predictors of species occurrence and biodiversity threats. Although there are LULC datasets available for ecologists under current conditions, there is a lack of such data under past and future climatic conditions. This hinders projecting the predictions from niche and distribution models over global change scenarios at different time periods. The Land Use Harmonization Project (LUH2) is a global dataset in raster format covering continental areas, and provides massive LULC data from 850 to 2300. However, these data are compressed in a file format (NetCDF) that are intractable by most ecologists. We aim to selected the most useful LULC data for ecologists, transformed the existing dataset into regular GIS formats and derived new LULC data often used in macroecology and ecological niche modeling and provide this data LULC data for thirty-seven time slices from year 900 to 2100, with the following temporal resolution - every 100 years from 900 to 1950, every 10 years from 1950 to 2010, and every five years from 2010 to 2300.

BioLab Open Source Projects

By: Boï Kone, Bakary N’tji Diallo

Mentored by: Delphine Lariviere

BioLab Open Source Projects is the beginning of a platform where biomedical researchers, and computer scientists will work closely with to solve some main tropical infectious diseases through collaboration and sharing ideas. Being the main source of problems in Africa, tropical diseases are affecting the socio-economic development of this part of the world. The time is now the raise the state of the consciousness of the problem by creating an environment where the only interest is sharing. Sharing ideas, knowledge, skills, and opportunities about biology. The main challenge in African biomedical research science is the lack of resources and sharing skills, especially amount young generation of the scientist whom most of the time doesn’t have the orientation and necessary information to address. The project stands to build a community around the main challenge surrounding tropical infectious diseases as Malaria, Tuberculosis… To tackle this challenge of the biological understanding of the proportion of burden, the need for more training prospective and collaboration between students, young researchers, and potential supervising programs. We will try to build an open-source project around these challenges to better understand these diseases’ interaction modes with drugs via bioinformatics tools. The benefit will provide training support to the students, young researchers together and bring solutions for general health problems, and be able to share them on collaboration purposes and training.

Target approach in the stages of liver cirrhosis to reverse back in good condition

By: Wasifa Rahman

Mentored by: Sonika Tyagi, Malvika Sharan

This is a brand new project for the target approach in the stages of liver cirrhosis. This project will identify the significant reasons behind developing cirrhosis and to prevent that staging development in continuation of this damage. The major focuses to reverse the damage into healthy condition are the enzymes, mutations, snp, genetic factors related to disease progression. These are the key aspects to target the stages of liver cirrhosis and to identify there role to a healthy growing liver or decrease there damaging features.

Science For All (Sci4All) - Citizens’ daily problem solving by engaging multidisciplinary scientific communities

By: Teresa Laguna, Laura Judith Marcos-Zambrano

Mentored by: Katharina Lauer

Status: graduated

The project concept is to establish a collaboration between the general public and scientists, where the citizens can expose their daily issues and scientists can collaborate to try to find solutions for them. For that purpose, we aim to establish a multidisciplinary scientific network who help citizens to improve their daily life. To start the project, we think it is more appropriate to first create local communities, starting in Madrid as it the location of the applicants. In the future, the local network can be expanded or occasionally contact other local communities, such as the ones already established by means of this program (Barcelona, Utrecht, Montreal), to work collaboratively in global public issues. Connections with companies can also be established (for example, to help in the production of prototypes) but with the requirement of use open licenses and follow the precepts of this program.

Supervised Classification with UMAP and Network Propagation

By: Joel Hancock, Markus Kirolos Youssef

Mentored by: Markus Löning

Using UMAP and network propagation to make a fast, accurate and interpretable supervised learning algorithm. We will benchmark our novel method against other state-of-the art machine learning algorithms using image analysis data, and other single-cell readouts. Supervised tasks using features with many artifacts and strange distributions and are typically solved using computationally intensive neural nets. This kind of data frequently occurs in morphological image analysis and bioinformatics generally. We would like to apply the technique to different datasets, investigate its theoretical underpinnings and see whether GPUs and other computational resources can be leveraged to improve the speed of classifications. Publish the results in an open science journal and make the code available to the community.

Building a Database for Open Access Immunology Pre-prints and Publications on COVID-19

By: Harriet Natabona Mukhongo, Brenda Muthoni, Jelioth Muthoni

Mentored by: Naomi Penfold

Status: graduated

This project aims to develop a database of open-access Immunology pre-prints and publications on COVID-19. As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolds, scientists are working round-the-clock to generate data, resulting in an upsurge of information on various aspects of the virus. Various publishers such as Lancet, Elsevier, Oxford, New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), Nature, have open access early journal releases and publications on a wide range of fields covering the COVID-19 topic. Many efforts are still underway to develop a feasible vaccine with trials taking place at different research centers globally. An open repository of open access pre-prints and journal articles in the area of COVID-19 immunology and vaccinology will easily connect researchers on current data available for efficient communication of scientific research and open science principles. The repository will be divided into subsections of publications from the 7 continents to be able to easily identify how the disease is affecting different geographical locations.

Sharing 3D Modeling Workflows for Biomechanists and Palaeontologists

By: Eva Herbst, Dylan Bastiaans

Mentored by: Holger Dinkel

Status: graduated

We recently received some funding from our university to host a workshop about 3D modeling methods for biomechanics. This sparked the idea of creating some sort of online database of workflows in our field. This website will serve early career researchers or researchers starting out with biomechanical analyses, or those wishing to switch their workflows (for example to be more freeware based). Currently there is a need for a central repository of such workflows. Usually they are only circulated within lab groups or between collaborators. However, an online hub with modeling resources would significantly reduce the time researchers need to invest in choosing programs and figuring out how to set up their models, giving them more time to do research and develop new methods. For this project, we specifically want to build a website with open source workflows, tips and tricks for setting up models for finite element analysis, as well as other 3D workflows (such as fossil reconstruction in freeware programs).

Open Science Office Hours to support trainees in Montreal to help make their research more open and reproducible

By: Kendra Oudyk

Mentored by: Andrew Stewart

Status: graduated

The goal of this project is to establish Open-Science Office Hours, a meeting space where students in Montreal can come throughout the year to get help making their research more open and reproducible. This initiative will promote Open Education in life science, particularly in the area of neuroimaging data science. Students in this field often learn hard skills in open science at weekend workshops, summer schools, and hackathons, but there is a gap in the learning experience regarding long-term support. The main measurable outcome of this project would be having a group of senior trainees who take turns hosting Open-Science office hours at regular intervals throughout the year. These meetings would take place virtually and/or in person in Montreal, Canada (depending on COVID-19). Although we hope to spark this initiative, it would need community support to be sustainable. In the first stage, I would welcome collaborators to help plan. Later, we would need support in the form of funding so that we can compensate TA’s; this would help enable less-privileged trainees to get involved as TA’s. Finally, we would need to recruit the TA’s. Thus, this project will involve community contributions at all stages, in various capacities.

Registered Reports in Primate Neurophysiology

By: Danny Garside

Mentored by: Ivo Jimenez

Status: graduated

In this new project I aim to explore the specific challenges (both practical and metascience related) to adoption of registered reports in primate neurophysiology. As far as we aware there has not yet been a registered report within the field of non-human-primate (NHP) neurophysiology. There are specific challenges for using this format within this field; some practical and some metascientific. A central issue is that the existing format for registered reports focuses on hypothesis testing, whereas neurophysiology is quite often an exploratory and iterative process. Working with NHPs is a necessarily limited privilege and comes with considerable responsibility; the cost of having experiments where the results are not robust, or where opportunities for discovery are missed, is particularly high, since opportunity for replication is limited. Therefore, peer review in advance of performing an experiment seems a particularly valuable idea. This project would explore ways in which to find compromise in the conflict between existing registered report formats and current methodologies in primate neurophysiology.

OSUM - Open Science UMontreal

By: Samuel Burke, Andréanne Proulx, Pauline Ligonie, Myreille Larouche, Valerie Parent, Béatrice P.De Koninck

Mentored by: Renato Alves

Status: graduated

We are building Open Science UMontreal (OSUM) - a student initiative - whose aims are to create an onboarding experience to the practice of open science (in all of its forms) for the predominantly french-speaking scientific community in Quebec (and beyond). We aim to attract as many stakeholders as possible (from scientists at the level of undergraduate, all the way to emeritus status); to unite those who already have a strong open science mindset and to build our resources such that we become the first point of contact for the local scientific community. OSUM will discuss open science values, principles, and practices. By raising awareness of current issues, we hope this project will continue to drive the culture shift and help people realize how they can immediately benefit from using open and reproducible practices. Furthermore, we strive to navigate our institution towards becoming an institutional member of OSF, just as the University of British-Columbia has done in the last year. As open science is a broad and wide-ranging concept with domain-specific definitions, we want to provide opportunities to meet and encourage the exchange of ideas within and across fields because we can all learn from each other.

APBioNetTalks

By: Hilyatuz Zahroh

Mentored by: Patricia Herterich

Status: graduated

APBioNetTalks is a new program to be launched by Asia Pacific Bioinformatics Network (APBioNet) by the mid of 2020. It will serve as an online platform to host and stream bioinformatics related talks, tutorials, and training. The program aims to facilitate the learning of bioinformatics to be more inclusive and accessible. It will invite experts, early career researchers/scientists, and Ph.D. students from different countries and institutions to share their knowledge and skills with the audiences. Upon the completion of live streaming, the videos will be archived and available on-demand. The program will help provide people with open bioinformatics resources and foster the growth of bioinformatics. Additionally, the program is also expected to reach wider audiences and introduce more people to the bioinformatics.

Database for coordinating training needs in Kenya to faciliatate preparation and collaboration

By: Pauline Karega

Mentored by: Lorena Pantano, Sarah Gibson

Status: graduated

There are many universities in Kenya in different counties offering life sciences as part of their curriculum. There’s, however, a difference in accessibility to resources. There are a number of science clubs in these universities. In light of the recent pandemic, there has been a change in how conferences and science events are being conducted, which has proven that online training is an effective mode of training and so is remote distribution of resources. With increasing need to adopt online trainings and conferences, and to narrow the gap in distribution of resources to different institutions and also encourage collaboration, I propose a platform that contains data of all science clubs in Kenyan institutions. The platform will allow submissions of training needs from the different institutions to allow narrowed down preparation and it will also allow collaboration of students from various institutions. From requests obtained, organization of talks and trainings can be more efficient and organized. These can transition into physical meetups eventually

Open platform for Indian Bioinformatics community

By: Pradeep Eranti

Mentored by: David Selassie Opoku

Status: graduated

The Bioinformatics community is one of the ever-growing communities in India, which has its presence across the length and breadth of the country. Likewise, the education and research programs spread across different branches of the Bioinformatics topic as its focus. There is a need for establishing open platform(s) where students, (early-career and established) researchers, policy makers could exchange knowledge freely across these different areas through open science practices and principles. In realizing such a platform, the benefits of following open principles need to be widely communicated for bringing awareness among the community by building pathways and encouraging contributors & ambassadors. The aim of this project is to explore the scope and path towards establishing an open platform and provide opportunities to participate, contribute and organize open initiatives.

OpenWorkstation - A modular and open-source concept for customized automation equipment

By: Sebastian Eggert

Mentored by: Meag Doherty

Status: graduated

The OpenWorkstation project presents a modular and open-source concept to develop customized automation equipment. Inspired by assembly lines, the concept consists of ready-to-use and customizable hardware modules which can be plugged into the base frame. In contrast to current commercial and open-source standalone solutions, this concept enables the combination of single hardware modules – each with a specific set of functionalities – to a modular workstation to provide a fully automated setup. The base setup consists of a pipetting and transport module and is designed to execute basic protocol steps for in vitro research applications, including pipetting operations for non-viscous and viscous liquids and transportation of cell culture vessels between the modules. The successful application of this concept is presented within a case study by the development of a storage module to facilitate high-throughput studies and a crosslinker module to initiate polymerization of hydrogel solutions. By combining capabilities from various open source instrumentations into a modular technology platform, this concept has the potential to facilitate the development of customized automation equipment for efficient and reliable experimentation for in vitro research. Ultimately, the OpenWorkstation concept will allow empower academic groups to the develop their own equipment to automated their research workflows.

The Turing Way - Guide for Ethical Research

By: Sophia Batchelor, Ismael Kherroubi Garcia, Laura Carter

Mentored by: Jez Cope, Anjali Mazumder

Status: graduated

The Turing Way project aims to provide all the information that data scientists in academia, industry, government and in the third sector need at the start of their projects to ensure that they are easy to reproduce and reuse at the end. The Guide for Ethical Research is one book of the project (complementing the other four which cover reproducible research, project design, communication, and collaboration). Producing an initial a full draft of the Guide for Ethical Research aims to positively impact research in the following ways:

  1. Equipping data science researchers to approach their work in a more reflective way and to think holistically about their research, its processes and outcomes
  2. Equipping scientists working in a range of fields to advocate for ethical research at all stages of the research process.
  3. Compiling diverse research ethics resources in one area.

sktime - a unified toolbox for machine learning with time series

By: Markus Löning

Mentored by: Martina Vilas

Status: graduated

sktime is a new Python toolbox for machine learning with time series. We provide state-of-the-art time series algorithms and scikit-learn compatible tools for building, optimising and evaluating complex models, based on a clear taxonomy of learning tasks and clear design principles and patterns. We want to enable understandable and accessible machine learning with time series by providing instructive documentation and by building a friendly, collaborative and inclusive community. The aim is to unify the time series analysis field by providing a common framework for multiple learning tasks, bringing together contributors from academia and the wider data science community into a joint framework and embedding best practices into the time series analysis field.

Turing Data Stories

By: Camila Rangel Smith, David Beavan, Sam Van Stroud, Kevin Xu

Mentored by: Yo Yehudi

Status: graduated

Our goal at Turing Data Stories is to produce educational data science content through the storytelling medium for the general public. Our content will be split into different stories, which begin with an interesting and relevant real-world hypothesis and walks the user through the entire data science process - from gathering and cleaning the data, to using it for data analysis. The aim of the Turing Data Stories is to spark curiosity and motivate more people to play with data. The Turing Data Stories are detailed and pedagogic Jupyter Notebooks that document an interesting insight or result using real world open data. A Turing Data Story follows these principles:

  1. The story should be told in an engaging and educational way, describing both the context of the story and the methods used in the analysis.
  2. The analysis must be fully reproducible (the notebooks should be executable by others using a provided computer environment, requiring no installation of software)
  3. The results should be transparent, all data sources are correctly referred to or included.
  4. In order to maintain the quality of the results, the story should be peer-reviewed by other contributors before being published.

Embedding Accessibility in The Turing Way Open Source Community Guidance

By: Neha Moopen, Paul Owoicho

Mentored by: Samuel Guay

Status: graduated

The Turing Way book is a community-driven book for reproducible research in data science. It is written by data scientists, academics, researchers, students, technologists, software engineers, policymakers, educators and other stakeholders from varying technical backgrounds. I will be contributing to the project as a technical writer from September 2020 to December 2020 where I will have the following responsibilities:

  1. Helping authors in effectively engaging with the project and collaborating in groups to write, edit and review current and new chapters in the book.
  2. Developing resources that will ensure consistency across all chapters and make the book more comprehensible for readers.
  3. Making pages more responsive and discoverable so that readers can read it on any device (like a smartphone or a tablet) with the same efficiency.
  4. Participating in the community discussions of the project to learn about the experience of its readers, authors, collaborators, and other members through their stories of using the book.

All these tasks in The Turing Way will require me to integrate Open Science principles and community practices, which I am confident to learn with my participation in the Open Life Science training and mentoring program.

Towards open and citizen-led data informing the decarbonisation of existing housing

By: Kate Simpson

Mentored by: Arielle Bennett

Status: graduated

The Design for Retrofit project I work on at The Alan Turing Institute, within the Data-Centric Engineering programme aims to use data-driven methods to address uncertainty in design stage decision-making towards reducing the carbon impact of homes through retrofit. This involves quantification of the current energy demand of housing archetypes and physics-based modelling to evaluate the impact of energy-efficiency technologies available to be installed in the home during the retrofit process. However, uncertainty exists due to a lack of monitored data on indoor air temperature, which leads to a performance gap between modelled and monitored energy demand as heating practices are the most sensitive parameter within building energy modelling. Further uncertainty is acknowledged due to a lack of longitudinal data following retrofit. Such data could inform the evaluation of long-term impacts of technologies installed, to inform future decision making. Motivated householders who are planning or recently completed a retrofit project might be interested to share data, perhaps in return for research insight on the impacts and success of similar projects through a citizen science approach. This is an idea in development for follow-on research which requires data collection protocols, ethical guidelines and data repositories.

Autistica - Turing Citizen Science Project

By: Georgia Aitkenhead, Katharina Kloppenborg

Mentored by: Anelda van der Walt

Status: graduated

This project is to build an online citizen science platform with the collaboration of autistic people and their families. The platform will then be used to gather experiences in order to investigate how sensory processing might affect the ways autistic people navigate the world around them. We are also using learning from the project to create a framework to support researchers in making their own work more participatory. The project is a collaboration between The Alan Turing Institute – the UK’s national institute for data science and AI research, and Autistica, a UK autism research charity. I am working under the supervision of Dr. Kirstie Whitaker, an academic who is committed to the principles of open research and building welcoming and inclusive online communities. The funding for the project is a result of a James Lind priority setting alliance run by Autistica. It is a complex project with multiple stakeholders. Open Humans, a foundation who have provided the back end for the platform, and a development team from Fujitsu are currently co-designing the front-end interface with the input of the autistic community. Most important are a diverse and growing number of autistic participants and (sometimes overlapping) open source developers.

Arua City Open Learning Circles

By: Ibrahim Ssali

Mentored by: Caleb Kibet

The H3ABioNet Open Learning Circles (OLC) Initiative aims to build a community of peers committed to learning and teaching each other different skills (coding, data analysis, etc.) through lectures, tutorials and work on collaborative projects. The goal is to have regular meetups for scientists, researchers and students to openly work together, learn/share code, learn new tools/software or simply improve their general coding skills. The project also allows space for continued learning and growth in various bioinformatics tools for our ex-trainees in this instance. In the beginning, learning circles will enable continuity of learning after IBT. To start a bioinformatics department and resource Centre at Muni University, Faculty of health sciences located in Arua City, West Nile, Uganda. The aim is to develop a critical mass of practitioners in this region who can develop and utilize Bioinformatics approaches to Biosciences. To enhance bioinformatics training at all levels and increase the size and quality of the pool of potential students and researchers. I am at a stage of proposal writing to start a bioinformatics department and resource centre at Muni University, Faculty of health sciences located in Arua City, West Nile, Uganda. The aim is to develop a critical mass of practitioners in this region who can develop and utilize Bioinformatics approaches to Biosciences. To enhance bioinformatics training at all levels and increase the size and quality of the pool of potential students and researchers.

Western Cape-H3ABioNet Open Learning Circles

By: Ekeoma Festus

Mentored by: Caleb Kibet, Lena Karvovskaya

The H3ABioNet Open Learning Circles (OLC) Initiative aims to build a community of peers committed to learning and teaching each other different skills (coding, data analysis, etc.) through lectures, tutorials and work on collaborative projects. The goal is to have regular meetups for scientists, researchers and students to openly work together, learn/share code, learn new tools/software or simply improve their general coding skills. The project also allows space for continued learning and growth in various bioinformatics tools for our ex-trainees in this instance. Through my participation in OLS, I will adapt the Open learning Circles Concept to our community in UWC.

Participants

The GitHub avatar of

Andréanne Proulx

@AndreanneProulx

Université de Montréal

The GitHub avatar of

Bailey Harrington

Pronouns: she/her

The GitHub avatar of

Bakary N'tji Diallo

The GitHub avatar of

Eugene de Beste

@edebeste

CHPC Ace Lab

The GitHub avatar of

Béatrice P.De Koninck

@B_DeKoninck

Université de Montréal

The GitHub avatar of

Beatriz Serrano-Solano

Pronouns: she/her
@BSerranoSolano

University Of Freiburg

Expertise:
Image analysis; data science; community; project management

More about Beatriz

The GitHub avatar of

Boï Kone

@boi_kone

The GitHub avatar of

Sophia Batchelor

Pronouns: she/her
@brainonsilicon

The Alan Turing Institute

Expertise:
Neuroscience
The GitHub avatar of

Christina Ambrosi

@CAmbrosi4

University of Zurich

The GitHub avatar of

Cooper Smout

Pronouns: He/him
@coopsmout

Institute For Globally Distributed Open Research And Education

Expertise:
Cognitive neuroscience, Psychology, Metascience, Peer review, Open access, Collective action, Community building

More about Cooper

The GitHub avatar of

Camila Rangel Smith

Pronouns: she/her
@camilarangels

The GitHub avatar of

Danny Garside

Pronouns: he/him
@da5nsy

Nih

Expertise:
Registered reports, Peer review, Open publishing, Preprints

More about Danny

The GitHub avatar of

David Beavan

@DavidBeavan

The Alan Turing Institute

The GitHub avatar of

Dylan Bastiaans


Palaeontological Institute and Museum, University of Zurich

The GitHub avatar of

Emma Karoune

Pronouns: she/her
@ekaroune

The Alan Turing Institute And Historic England

Expertise:
Fair data, Sensitive data, Community building, Open publishing, Phytoliths, Environmental archaeology, Palaeoecology

More about Emma

The GitHub avatar of

Ekeoma Festus

Pronouns: they/them
@ekeluv

Medical biosciences UWC

The GitHub avatar of

Eva Herbst

Pronouns: she/her
@EvaCHerbst

The GitHub avatar of

Georgia Aitkenhead

Pronouns: She/her

The Alan Turing Institute

Expertise:
Citizen science, Participatory science, Open source, Neurodiversity, Sensory processing, Co-creation

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Hilyatuz Zahroh

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@hilyatuzzahrah

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Ibrahim Ssali

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@ibrahssali1

Muni University

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Ismael Kherroubi Garcia

Pronouns: He/him
@hermeneuticist

The Alan Turing Institute

Expertise:
History of science, Philosophy of the social sciences, Philosophy of science

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Jelioth Muthoni

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Joel Hancock

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Joyce Kao

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@joyceykao

University Hospital Rwth Aachen

Expertise:
Open innovation, Digitalization

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Pauline Karega

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@KaregaP

Bioinformatics Hub Of Kenya Intitiative

Expertise:
Bioinformatics
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Kate Simpson

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@Dr_KateSimpson

Imperial College London/ The Alan Turing Institute

Expertise:
Open community development, Basic open science principles, Basic github skills, Energy, carbon and enironmental data for buildings

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Katharina Kloppenborg

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@k_kloppenborg

Center For Research & Interdisciplinarity (Cri)

Expertise:
User experience, User-centered/participatory design, Citizen science, Peer production, Illustration

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Kevin Xu

@kevinzhangxu

Civil Service

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Markus Kirolos Youssef

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@my_kiri

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Kendra Oudyk

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@koudyk_

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Laura Carter

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@LauraC_rter

University Of Essex

Expertise:
Human rights; gender; sexuality; critical data studies

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Laura Judith Marcos-Zambrano

@13laurichi

IMDEA Food Institute

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Markus Löning

Pronouns: he/him
@mm_loening

University College London

Expertise:
Git, GitHub, Software development, Python, Continuous integration, Unit testing, Machine learning, Packaging/distribution, Applied machine learning projects in biochemical engineering, health and agricultural research

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Muhammet Celik

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Myreille Larouche


Institute for Research in Immunology and Cancer of the Université de Montréal

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Harriet Natabona Mukhongo

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@hnatabona

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Neha Moopen

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@NehaMoopen

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Pauline Ligonie

@PaulineLigonie

Université de Montréal

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Paul Owoicho

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@N/A

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Pradeep Eranti

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@pradeeperanti

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Peter van Heusden

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@pvanheus

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Samuel Burke

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@kernow_qc

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Sam Van Stroud


Ucl

Expertise:
Data Science, GitHub, Software development, Python, Machine learning, Particle Physics

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Sebastian Eggert

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@se_eggert

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Sangram Sahu

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@sangram_ksahu

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Stephen Klusza

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@codebiologist

Atlanta Metropolitan State College, Adjunct Faculty and Laboratory Professional for Biology

Expertise:
Life sciences, Genetics, Synthetic biology, Accessibility

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Brenda Muthoni

@brendaksoni

Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, Nairobi

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Stefan Gaillard

Pronouns: he/him
@sdmgaillard

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Tainá Rocha

@Tai_Rocha_

Botanical Garden Of Rio De Janeiro

Expertise:
Patterns of biodiversity distribution in time and space, Impacts of climate change on biodiversity, Spatial analysis

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The GitHub avatar of

Teresa Laguna

@teresa__laguna

Imdea Food Research Institute

Expertise:
Bionformatics, Immunology, Nutrition, Citizen Science
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Valerie Parent


Law Faculty, Université de Montréal

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Wasifa Rahman