Announcing the 2018 Executive Council for the Carpentries

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Voting in the election for community governance of the Carpentries (Executive Council, formerly named Steering Committee or Board of Directors) closed last week. Out of the 501 members eligible for voting, 147 ballots were cast (29% turnout).

We are pleased to announce the four newly elected members of the Executive Council:

• Raniere Silva
• Lex Nederbragt
• Amy Hodge
• Elizabeth Wickes

Raniere and Lex received the highest number of votes and will serve two year terms; Amy and Elizabeth will serve one year terms.

These four elected members will join the five appointed Council members selected from the current leadership of Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry:

• Karen Cranston is a computational biologist at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada working on digitisation and integration of biodiversity data. She was the lead PI of the Open Tree of Life phylogeny synthesis project, and serves on the board of the Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF). She has been involved with Software Carpentry since 2012, was a founding board member of Data Carpentry, and is a certified instructor trainer.

• Kate Hertweck is an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Tyler. Her research and teaching focuses on bioinformatics and genomics. She completed Instructor Training in fall 2014, served on the Mentoring Subcommittee in 2015, and was elected to the Software Carpentry Steering Committee in 2016 and 2017, also serving as Chair in 2017.

• Mateusz Kuzak is Scientific Community Manager at the Dutch Tech Center for Life Sciences. He has background in bioinformatics live cell imaging and research software engineering, and is passionate about Open Source, Open Science and Reproducible Research. He is currently working on training activities and coordinating life science data and technology projects in the Netherlands. Mateusz is an Instructor Trainer and was elected to the 2017 Software Carpentry Steering Committee.

• Sue McClatchy is a bioinformatician and research program manager at the Jackson Laboratory. She provides research training at all academic levels from high school to faculty. She mentors students and develops training materials for analysis of quantitative and high-throughput data. Her expertise in curriculum design and instruction stems from an eight-year science teaching career in schools in the U.S. and Latin America. Sue is an Instructor Trainer and was elected to the 2017 Software Carpentry Steering Committee.

• Ethan White is an Associate Professor at the University of Florida working on computational and data-intensive ecology. He is a Moore Foundation Investigator in Data Driven Discovery and serves on the board of directors of Impactstory. He has been involved in Software Carpentry since 2009, was a founding member of the Data Carpentry steering committee, wrote the first version of the Data Carpentry Ecology SQL material, and leads the development of the semester long Data Carpentry course for biologists.

Many thanks to all candidates who chose to stand for election. The voting was very close, which reflects the commitment you all show towards service to our community. We are fortunate to have such awesome leaders representing diverse education, careers, and geography. We look forward to continuing to work with you in the Carpentries community, and hope you will consider pursuing other opportunities for leadership.

Also thanks to the outgoing steering committee members:

• Software Carpentry: Rayna Harris, Christina Koch, Karin Lagesen
• Data Carpentry: Hilmar Lapp, Aleksandra Pawlik, Karthik Ram

Finally, thanks to all of you across the Carpentries for your continued participation and engagement!