Welcome to the 2023 Trainers Leadership Committee!

In February, the Trainer community held its third annual election for Trainers Leadership, a Committee that provides governance and development support to our growing subcommunity of Instructor Trainers, and makes decisions on behalf of that community that affect our Instructor Training program and related policies.

In their second year as an elected body, the Trainers Leadership Committee (TLC!) oversaw many important changes. These included:

• The first implementation of the Certification Renewal process approved by the Trainer community in 2021. The careful oversight of Leadership made this a successful milestone, balancing goals to maintain a community that is active, sustainable, and inclusive.
• Creation of a transparent process for proposal and scheduling of Trainer meetings and topics. This lays a foundation for increased community influence on and support for meetings that provide enriching and timely development opportunities.
• Design and approval of recommendations to make changes to the Instructor Checkout process, based on a broad community assessment project implemented in 2022. The 2023 Leadership will be working with Core Team to plan implementation, with some changes tentatively scheduled for June.
• Creation of more inclusive procedures for this committee, including use of asynchronous commenting and voting to achieve quorum. The challenge of operating groups with global representation is significant for all Carpentries subcommunities, and this group aims to create a model for procedures that are both effective and manageable for our volunteer participants in all time zones.
• Updating community documentation to better reflect policies and procedures, including changes to the Certification Renewal process and documentation for this Committee. These changes were presented to the full community and ratified during the election in February.

Details on these and other accomplishments of this Committee are available in the reports and issues sections on the Trainers repository.

Our 2023 Trainers Leadership panel is:

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 Queensland universities. He is an active contributor to the Australasian digital skills training community, and is involved in a range of initiatives to increase the accessibility and quality of training opportunities available to research students across Australia and surrounding regions.

Paola Corrales

Paola is a Ph.D. student at the University of Buenos Aires. She is part of the latinamerican community where she has contributed to translations projects of Carpentries’ materials and organize Instructor Training events in Spanish. She is a professor at the Data Sciences degree and postgraduate courses at Guillermo Brown University. She also develops openly licensed materials to teach and learn R and other tools. She is excited to be part of the leadership teams and to bring a different perspective. She looks forward to hearing from other trainers about their experience and how to keep growing the community.

Trisha Adamus

Trish Adamus started her professional career as a High School Chemistry teacher and moved on to Research and Development for companies such as Kodak and Bausch & Lomb, with a focus in Chemistry and Microbiology. Trisha was awarded a fellowship in eScience at Syracuse University in 2010 and graduated with a Masters in Library and Information Science in 2012. Since 2012 she has worked as Research Data Librarian working at Ebling Library for the Health Sciences at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. Trisha teaches about data management planning and policy at UW-Madison, and computational skills for researchers at both UW-Madison and other institutions. She has been a Carpentries Instructor since 2016, an Instructor Trainer since 2020, and in 2023 she joins the Instructor Trainer Leadership Committee. Trisha was also a co-chair for CarpentryCon in 2022. When not at work, Trisha enjoys playing ice hockey, board games and video games, knitting, crocheting, reading fiction, and camping in her Recreational Vehicle with her husband and two dogs.

Annajiat Alim Rasel

I am Annajiat Alim Rasel, a Sr. Lecturer at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering under the School of Data and Sciences (SDS), Brac University, Bangladesh. I usually teach problem-solving skills using Java and Python while trying to explore the exciting fields of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Parallel, Distributed, and High-Performance Computing (HPC). I feel privileged to be a part of The Carpentries community and am trying to gain more knowledge, skills, and experience. It is amazing to work on Open Source materials and good teaching practices. We hope to build a Carpentries community in Bangladesh. We are trying to learn more about FAIR and CARE principles while trying to promote diversity, localization, and accessibility.

Nathaniel Porter

I am the Social Science Data Consultant and Data Education Coordinator in the Virginia Tech University Libraries and Department of Sociology. In addition to coordinating over 20 local Carpentries instructors to organize at least 10 Carpentries workshops a year at Virginia Tech, I teach Sociology courses and a variety of data and programming workshops plus provide 1-on-1 project assistance with both quantitative and qualitative social science research. At the Carpentries, I’m also a maintainer for the Instructor Training Curriculum and co-chair of the Data Carpentry Social Science Curriculum Advisory Committee. My research is split between studying data pedagogy and whatever collaborations develop out of my consultations - so I’ve been part of papers on everything from cyberattacks to piglet grimaces. As someone managing ADHD and carpal tunnel, and as an aspiring decent human being, I also try to be a strong advocate for inclusive research and education practices.