Executive Council Officer Elections for 2020

The Carpentries Executive Council has elected officers for 2020 and appointed a liaison to the Code of Conduct Committee. Congratulations to all of our new officers! 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 organisational planning, selecting and evaluating the Executive Director, financial oversight of the organisation, identifying revenue streams and resource allocation, approving and monitoring our programs and services, and enhancing our public image. The Executive Council is composed of nine (9) members, four (4) of which serve as officers. The Carpentries Handbook has details about the responsibilities of each of the Executive Council officers.

The Executive Council members are looking forward to a challenging and exciting year that will include the launch of our new Strategic Plan and the hiring of a new Executive Director. In all that we do, we will strive to achieve the mission and vision of our organisation and to do so in a way that adheres to the values of our community.

New Officers + Liaison

Elizabeth Wickes will serve as the Chair for the upcoming year. 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.

Lex Nederbragt will serve as the Vice Chair for the upcoming year. He is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Biosciences, University of Oslo, Norway, and head of Education and Training for the Centre for Bioinformatics, Univ. of Oslo. Lex became a Software Carpentry instructor in 2013 and has been an instructor trainer for the Carpentries since 2016.

Joslynn Lee will serve as the Secretary for the upcoming year. She is an Assistant Professor in Biochemistry at Fort Lewis College in Durango, CO. Joslynn is of the Diné (Navajo), K’awaki (Laguna Pueblo) and Haaku (Acoma Pueblo) people. She teaches general chemistry, biochemistry and integrates computational analyses in courses and her research lab studying microbial communities. Joslynn became a Software Carpentry Instructor in 2016 during her time with the NSF-funded CyVerse. She also wants to support and increase computational training at PUIs and for Indigenous populations.

Juan Steyn will serve as the Treasurer for the upcoming year. He will work closely with Talisiha Sutton-Kennedy to ensure that The Carpentries finances are in order and sustainable. He is the project manager at the South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR) hosted at the North-West University in South Africa. He has been involved with the Carpentries since 2016 and has a particular interest in supporting and building capacity computational capacity in Southern Africa.

Konrad Förstner, one of our new Council members, will serve as the Executive Council liaison to the Code of Conduct Committee. He holds a PhD in bioinformatics and is a professor for Data and Information Literacy at the TH Köln - University of Applied Sciences as well as head of the information service unit at ZB MED - Information Centre for Life Sciences, Cologne, Germany. Konrad became a Software Carpentry Instructor in 2015 and an instructor trainer for The Carpentries in 2019.