Welcome to our New Instructor Trainers

We want to introduce you to our 14 new Instructors Trainers! They have just completed Trainer Training, are badged, and ready to jump in. Many of them are already scheduled to teach their first Instructor Trainings in the next few months! This group is full of passion, excitement, and great ideas! They will be such an asset to our community!

Please Welcome our New Trainers:

Ben Chiewphasa

I am the Economics and Data Librarian with the Navari Family Center for Digital Scholarship at the University of Notre Dame’s Hesburgh Libraries. In my current role, I provide information literacy, data analysis, and data visualization support via consultations as well as workshops and library instruction. My research interests include critical data literacy, community engagement efforts in academic libraries, and government information dissemination. I initially sought Carpentries Instructor certification to meet the needs of University of Montana graduate students who were generally aware of available tools and approaches for wrangling data, but lacked the opportunities to actually learn these skills and consequently apply them to their own research. I think the skills I’ve learned from Carpentries Instructor Training have made me a better teacher overall—whether it’s leading Carpentries workshops or even teaching credit-bearing courses. My time with the Carpentries has motivated me in lowering learning barriers and empowering researchers to conduct efficient, reproducible, and open research.

Bonny Adane

I am founder and coordinator for R-Ladies Addis Ababa; a civil engineer, an interior designer and lecturer living in Addis Ababa Ethiopia. I took carpentries training before starting my professional career life and decided I want to volunteer my time in digital and data literacy. The carpentries have helped me in widening my perspective in Teaching and learning process. I learn more on each training I deliver and I have enjoyed the experience the entire time I have been with the carpentries.

Grace Fishbein

I am the Training Coordinator for ACENET located in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada. In my role I am responsible for organizing and delivering training on technical tools to researchers in Atlantic Canada. The Carpentry workshops are a significant part of the training that we offer, providing opportunities for accessible training in our community. I was very fortunate to join an already flourishing Carpentries community at my local institution. I find it extremely rewarding and motivating to be a part of a like-minded group of people working towards a common goal. I thoroughly appreciate the pedagogy that the Carpentries is built on and I love that there is a strong commitment to teaching the novice learner by meeting them where they are at. I am eager to work to build the Carpentry community through communication and collaboration across Canada.

Hao Ye (twitter: @Hao_and_Y)

I am the Reproducibility Librarian at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida, USA. I had been leading a student-based R Users Group for several years before being introduced to Software Carpentry by friends in Bioinformatics; I later started a postdoc at the University of Florida where I went through instructor training and was a founding board member of the UF Carpentries Club. I seek to empower researchers to adopt more open and reproducible practices; I believe this makes them more efficient and effective, and is a pathway for more equity and inclusion in academia. I hope to adapt the principles from Instructor Training to other use cases and organizations, including internal professional development, Ally Skills training, and more. You might see me in other places, such as Reproducibility4Everyone, Open Life Science, Methods in Ecology & Evolution (associate editor), and Code for Science & Society (selection committee, Event Fund).

Jake Szamosi

I live and work in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, where I do bioinformatics and biostatistics for a wide variety of research labs in the departments of Medicine, Biochemistry, and beyond at McMaster University. I first became a Carpentries instructor in 2017 to help meet a need I was seeing at our institution for graduate students to quickly develop basic coding and command-line skills. I was inspired by the Carpentries’ dedication to lowering barriers to learning, and have remained involved as an instructor ever since. I decided to join the Instructor Trainers when the opportunity arose because I remain passionate about democratizing technical skills, and I hope to pass on the passion and skill for accessible teaching to as wide a group as possible.

Jannetta Steyn (http://jannetta.com/)

I live in Durham and work at Newcastle University in the UK as a Senior Research Software Engineer (https://rse.ncldata.dev/). I heard about Carpentries when someone mentioned it as an option to offer training to PhD students and researchers at our university. What attracted me to the Carpentries was the fact that everything is open source, it relies heavily on volunteers, training as an instructor does not cost an arm and a leg and I love the concept of teaching with live coding. When I am enthusiastic about something I want to tell the world about it and I love coding, computing and technology. I am originally from South Africa so when I can I contribute to the Afrikaans translation of Glosario. I have taken the lead to progress the CarpenPi project which sprouted from the HackDay of the Software Sustainability Institute’s Collaboration Workshop 2021.

Jonathan Wheeler

I am a Data Curation Librarian at the University of New Mexico. My first exposure to the Carpentries was as a helper at a Software Carpentry workshop organized by the biology department. That experience greatly helped to inform the development of my department’s ongoing series of short-form data science workshops, and I became a certified Carpentry instructor in the spring of 2019. I now direct a statewide Carpentry-based initiative, sponsored by the New Mexico EPSCoR, that is focused on building a community of instructors in support of workforce development. I look forward to broadening my participation in the Carpentries community through instructor training, and also through collaborative development of lessons using EPSCoR data products.

Kristin Lee

I am a Research Data Librarian at the Tisch Library at Tufts University. Part of my job is to work with my colleagues in the library and the Tufts Data Lab to provide workshops about data skills for researchers at all levels. I am one of the founders of the New England Software Carpentry Library Consortium (or NESCLiC), a group of institutions in New England that joined the Carpentries together and created a community of practice to support our Carpentries work. I loved Carpentries Instructor Training and am excited to introduce new Instructor candidates to our approach to pedagogy and creating spaces where everyone feels that they can use data and coding to their full potential. My side data projects are all related to the early American circus, especially Barnum & Bailey because of Tufts mascot, Jumbo the Elephant. I did not expect the records of the circus to be full of data sources and am delighted that I get to bring some of those data sources to life through maps and charts!

Lieke de Boer

I am a Scientific Community Manager at the eScience Center in Amsterdam, Netherlands. I am a coordinator of the eScience Center training programme, which includes many Carpentries courses. I also coordinate lesson development on Carpentries Incubator materials. I teach Carpentries courses because I believe it improves the quality of scientific research in the long run, and because I believe it empowers researchers to feel confident in their coding abilities. Before I worked at the eScience Center, I was a neuroscience researcher, and I taught Git and R to my peers. Naturally, I was very happy to find out about the Carpentries when I started working at the eScience Center. I hope I can reach many people in the Dutch (or international) academic landscape and help them learn how to teach others the basics of scientific programming.

Luis J. Villanueva

I am working as an Informatics Program Officer in the Digitization Program Office, a division of OCIO, the central IT office of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, USA. My work includes developing projects and tools to help the Smithsonian museums to create and enhance the records of the collections. Due to the size of the National Collections, containing thousands to millions of objects, we need to develop specialized tools that can work on a massive scale. I got involved in The Carpentries since these lessons are a great resource to teach the staff at the Institution to use more advanced tools than what they are used to. In addition, from my experience in academia, most institutions are not prioritizing teaching basic and advanced programming skills, a gap that The Carpentries lessons can help with. I also hope to contribute to the Spanish translations of the lessons and training of trainers that can teach learners in Spanish.

Nathaniel Porter (Twitter: @faithfulchange)

I am the Social Science Data Consultant and Data Education Coordinator in the Virginia Tech University Libraries and Affiliated Research Faculty in Sociology. In addition to coordinating the Carpentries at VT, I provide workshops, guest instruction and assistance in a variety of quantitative and qualitative research methods and software. My research interests include data collection best practices for surveys and survey experiments, data pedagogy, social science research replicability, and using non-traditional data for quantitative analysis. When I started in my role, we had a small group of Carpentries trainers and occasional workshops; becoming involved and building our instructor community has allowed us to scale to providing instruction to hundreds of learners each year and collaborating with departments and programs for specialized training.

Rabea Müller

I am a data librarian working at ZB MED Information Centre for Life Sciences in Cologne, Germany. Besides organizing our Carpentry workshops, I provide individual support for software, services and data handling and develop training materials in programming and data literacy. Since 2019, I am an Instructor at The Carpentries and have maintained The Carpentries Wikidata Lesson as part of my Bachelor thesis. Since November 2020 I am Regional Coordinator for the DACH region at The Carpentries and help organize workshops in our region in this role. I am grateful to be part of this inclusive community and want to be a part of opening learning barriers and making programming accessible and fun for everyone through The Carpentries.

Rainier Barrett

I’m a postdoc at Boise State University in Boise, Idaho, USA. I did my PhD in chemical engineering at the University of Rochester in New York, which is when I learned to program. During the annual AIChE conference in 2018, I met Eric Jankowski and his students, and he explained his involvement in The Carpentries and that he was looking for a postdoc. I loved the idea of an open and inclusive teaching platform to help folks get into programming, so it was a perfect fit! Teaching was my favorite part of grad school by far, so teaching as a professor became my career goal, and The Carpentries are helping me gain valuable teaching know-how and experience to help with that. A fun fact about me is one of my big hobbies is studying other languages and linguistics. I speak Spanish more-or-less fluently (but rusty) and I’m currently working on my Japanese. I love travelling and meeting folks from other countries so I look forward to any chance to help with any international Carpentries events!

Yanina Noemí Bellini Saibene

I’m a researcher at National Institute of Agricultural Technology in Argentina and I’m dedicated to applying data science to the agricultural sector. I’m also a professor at several National Universities. The Carpentries bring together two of my passions: science and teaching. I love teaching, because education can improve our lives and it is essential to narrow the structural inequalities in our society. This is why I co-founded MetaDocencia, an organization to expand good teaching practices to Spanish-speaking teachers for free. It is also one of the reasons I have to love communities of practice such as The Carpentries and R-Ladies (where I am part of the Global Team). Language can be a great barrier in my region, for that reason, I participate in translation efforts: I lead the translation of Teaching Tech Together and I’m part of the teams that translates R for Data Science, Carpentries’ lessons and Glosario terms to Spanish. I also really enjoy organizing events and conferences, that is why I am co-chair of useR!, LatinR and the Argentine Conference on Informatics.

A big thank you to each participant for their contributions to engaging discussions about teaching, the Instructor Training curriculum, and what it means to be a Trainer.

The Trainer Training curriculum is freely available and can be used by anyone. However, only trainees selected to participate in Carpentries Trainer Training are eligible to be badged as an Instructor Trainer.

If you want to become an Instructor Trainer, contact us and we will notify you the next time we are taking applications!