At its recent meeting on March 21, 2019, The Carpentries Executive Council elected officers for the current year and appointed a liaison to the Code of Conduct Committee. Congratulations to all of our new officials! You can learn a bit about each of them below.

The Executive Council is the governance arm of The Carpentries and is responsible for strategic and organizational planning, selecting and evaluating the Executive Director, financial oversight of the organization, identifying revenue streams and resource allocation, approving and monitoring our programs and services, and enhancing our public image. The Carpentries Handbook has details about the responsibilities of each of the Executive Council officers.

Our new officers are looking forward to a challenging and exciting year of positioning The Carpentries for a sustainable future with long-term goals that meet the values and mission of the organization and our community.

New Officers + Liaison

Amy Hodge will serve as the Chair for the upcoming year. Amy is a PhD life scientist working as the Science Data Librarian for Stanford University Libraries in Stanford, California. She has been involved with The Carpentries since 2013 as a host, instructor, trainer, and member of the Executive Council. Her favorite role is teaching in-person instructor trainings, and she is looking forward to working with the Council this year on strategic planning and improving the sustainability of The Carpentries.

Kate Hertweck will be continuing on as Vice-chair for the upcoming year. Kate is a Bioinformatics Training Manager at Fred Hutch Cancer Research Center in Seattle, and spends their days teaching reproducible computational methods and building communities of practice among researchers. They have been an instructor for The Carpentries since 2014, a trainer since 2018, and a member of community governance (first the Software Carpentry Steering Committee and now The Carpentries Executive Council) for the last four years.

Mesfin Diro Chaka, one of our new Executive Council members, will be serving as the Secretary. Mesfin is a computational data scientist and faculty member at Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia with high enthusiasm in expanding computational skills for better research outputs worldwide. He is interested in the areas of data science, bioinformatics, High Performance Computing (HPC), and High Tech Computing (HTC). Since the fall of 2017, he has been working with The Carpentries as an Instructor, a trainer, a member of the African Task Force, and a member of the Executive Council.

Raniere Silva will serve as the Treasurer of the 2019 Executive Council. He will work closely with Talisha Sutton-Kennedy to ensure that The Carpentries finances are in order and sustainable. Raniere is based in Manchester, UK, and teaches some workshops in Europe — his favourite lesson is Git because it gives you superpowers to create parallel universes.

Elizabeth Wickes will serve as the Executive Council liaison to the Code of Conduct Committee. She is a Lecturer at the University of Illinois within the School of Information Sciences, teaching and researching data curation, reproducibility, and programming. She was first certified as a Carpentries instructor in 2015 and later as a trainer in 2017.