Welcome to Trainers Leadership!

In February 2021, the Instructor Trainer community elected its first Trainers Leadership panel and ratified a preliminary governance structure for this Carpentries sub-community. This panel and its documentation remains provisional, pending creation of guidelines and an approval process for sub-community governance by The Carpentries Executive Council. In the interim, they will proceed to flesh out procedural plans and will engage with The Carpentries Core Team to represent the interests of the Trainer community on policies and plans that pertain to Instructor Training.

These elections were made possible by an initial, unelected group of Trainers who have volunteered their time over the past year to examine the need for governance, support key decisions, and create a plan to establish elected governance. The accomplishments of this group were substantially made possible by the persistent efforts of Sarah Brown, Brian Ballsun-Stanton, Mark Laufersweiler, and Tim Dennis, who formed the ‘backbone’ of this working group and saw our inaugural elections through to fruition. We are also very grateful for the advice and support of Arin Basu, Danielle Quinn, Fotis Psomopoulos, Christina Koch, Jessica Upani, and Rayna Harris.

Having a governance group for the Trainer community will improve the collaborative nature of our decision-making, helping to ensure that the interests of Trainers are represented and balanced against other organisational needs as The Carpentries continues to evolve. It will also help us to sustain a healthy and inviting Trainer community as we continue to welcome new members from across the globe. (And we will be inviting new Instructor Trainers soon – look out for an announcement when Trainer Training applications open for our next cohort!)

Please welcome the newly elected members of Trainers Leadership!

Arindam (‘Arin’) Basu

Associate Professor of Epidemiology and Environmental Health at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. Arin is keen on data science, machine learning in the context of Epidemiology. He would love to see the Carpentries expand everywhere and if possible, including how the Carpentries can be integrated in the context of learning and teaching in the universities.

Sarah Brown (Chair)

Sarah Brown is Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Rhode Island, located in a small beach town in the northeast United States. Sarah’s lab works on system level interventions for fairer machine learning powered AI by understanding the problems in collaboration with social scientists, analyzing ML algorithms and designing novel algorithms. Sarah’s goal for the trainer leadership is to get processes set up to facilitate more transparent, inclusive decision making in the trainer community so that we can spend more time discussing the curriculum itself.

Amanda Charbonneau

Amanda Charbonneau is the Inreach and Outreach Coordinator for the Common Fund Data Ecosystem Coordination Center, an NIH initiative to increase access and use of NIH Common Fund datasets. She has an eclectic scientific background and has variously worked on topics such as population genetics, spectrometry, entomology, genomics, and building tank armor. She uses these experiences to train scientists to use new computational tools and data types, as well as to build and manage communities. Her interests include statistics, coding, video games, and occasionally tweeting at https://twitter.com/procrastinomics.

Mark Crowe

Mark Crowe is the Skills Development Manager for QCIF in Queensland, Australia, where he manages a team of research computing support professionals who offer training, coaching, and advice to researchers from all seven Queensland universities. He is a recent but enthusiastic convert to the Carpentries, first learning about it less than two years ago, and is working to encourage the further adoption of Carpentries approaches throughout Australia and the surrounding regions.

Jeff Oliver (Secretary)

Jeff Oliver is the Data Science Specialist at the University of Arizona Libraries, where he advocates and agitates for data and computational literacy. When he isn’t consulting on the R programming language or trying to teach Python, he occasionally sullies his fingers with phylo- and ecoinformatic analyses. He is most looking forward to facilitating more and varied opportunities for Carpentries Instructor Training, while being respectful of the volunteer Trainers’ time.