Honoring Omar Khan, The Carpentries Communications Manager

Omar Khan joined The Carpentries in 2020 to support all aspects of communications for our organisation. He was the primary driver of getting the community the information they needed by developing our annual communications strategy and implementing our internal workflows. His work included, but was not limited to, compiling content for our newsletter, engaging the community on social media, and identifying important, timely, and interesting content for our blog. Omar is also an extremely talented graphic design artist who developed emojis, logos, templates, reports, and some really cool hex stickers.

As a member of the Community Development Team, Omar provided updates on ongoing communications efforts. He advised on how to effectively integrate communications that were accessible in all of our activities. Omar has spent many hours adding captions to our video recordings and alt text to images across all of our resources. He supported communications for all of our public-facing events, including the most recent CarpentryCon. It was his support that made this event and many others successful.

In 2022, Omar joined the Business Team to provide a marketing and communications strategy related to fundraising and enhancing The Carpentries’ public image. Omar’s perspective and insight have helped us advance the organisation’s capacity-building priorities, and we are so grateful to have had the opportunity to work with him on this team.

Omar’s work will be everpresent, even after his departure, through his leadership of our website redesign. This resulted in a new style guide and templates to provide cohesive branding across the organisation. You’ll be seeing the products of this great work in the coming months.

Omar, we cannot thank you enough for all that you have done to support the Core Team and our community. You will be missed, but we look forward to seeing your success from afar as you transition into your new role.

A Message from Omar Khan

I want to thank the entire Carpentries Core Team and Community for making my 3 years at The Carpentries a wonderful experience. While I am sad to be leaving, I know that the work that the organisation is doing will be effective and am proud to have been a part of it.

I joined The Carpentries in March of 2020 not having encountered or been a part of the Carpentries community and immediately felt welcomed into the community of open science. Every person I worked with in any capacity in my role here was warm, helpful, and truly believed in the ideals and values of The Carpentries and open science. It was incredibly heartening to be a part of a community that truly cares about the work that they are doing and its role in improving access to data education.

I look forward to seeing what The Carpentries community and Core Team do next, and how the organisation continues to grow - this time from the community side.