Introducing Our 2024 Cohort of Certified Instructor Trainers!
In August, we began training a new cohort of community leaders to become certified as Instructor Trainers. These are the people who co-teach Instructor Training events, host teaching demonstrations, and participate in oversight and maintenance of our Instructor Training program as a whole. With 22 people, we are proud to say this is the largest cohort ever to join the Instructor Trainer community! Our new Instructor Trainers are joining us from universities, informatics centers, government departments, and corporations across Australia, Canada, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Training the next generation of Carpentries Instructors is important work! We are so proud to have these amazing people join our Instructor Trainer community and advance our mission around the world.
Please Welcome our New Trainers!
Amanda Kis
I’m a lecturer at the University of Oklahoma (Norman, Oklahoma, United States) in their meteorology and mathematics departments, and I teach a wide variety of weather, climate, and math courses for majors and non-majors. I attended several Carpentries workshops as a learner through OU Libraries, became friends with their certified Instructors, and learned through them about Carpentries pedagogy. I immediately saw the value of what I learned and decided to go through Carpentries Instructor certification myself so I could train in their pedagogy and apply it to my courses and workshops. I love to teach, and I’m always looking for new ways to teach: Becoming an Instructor Trainer will help me further expand what I teach, especially since I do not directly teach pedagogy in my courses. Everything I’ve learned through The Carpentries Instructor Training and now Instructor Trainer Training feeds back on what I teach in my courses and workshops, and I’m so excited to integrate deeper into The Carpentries community, learn from other passionate Instructors, and practice more!
Brook Moyers
I’m a professor in the Biology Department at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, where my lab studies the ecological genomics of useful plants. I was first a Carpentries learner in grad school, back when it was just Software Carpentry, then acted as a helper and trained to be an Instructor as a postdoc. I found Instructor Training really impactful for more than just teaching workshops, and I regularly use the best practices I learned in my university classrooms. I have taught SWC, DC/Ecology, DC/Genomics, and DC/Geospatial workshops, and modified the ecology and genomics lessons materials for non-official workshops/courses. I love teaching about bash and R, although I find teaching git or databases pretty challenging! No matter what the content, I always come back to the lessons I learned in Instructor Training, and I hope to share them with as many Instructors as I can!
Cera Fisher
Cera Fisher is Community Engagement Manager for both the Cancer Genomics Cloud and NHLBI BioData Catalyst at Velsera. Her day-to-day work involves making it easy to use sophisticated software tools and helping people move from data intimidation to data mastery. Cera has taught Carpentries sporadically since 2016, and her favourite lesson is Shell Novice–it’s like seeing someone turn a computer on for the first time. She was previously a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Cornell University and received her Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Connecticut.
Claudia Guerrero S.
I have been a professor in the engineering and exact sciences departments at the Autonomous University of Guadalajara, the Autonomous University of Coahuila, and the Ibero-American University of Torreón. I have given courses in mathematics, chemistry, statistics, and databases, from where I began learning the R language and reproducible research from different open online university proposals, including those of The Carpentries, which is why I was interested in being part of the community. I am a Chemical Engineer and have Master’s degrees in Systems, Education, History, and Cultural Management.
David Palmquist
I am an analyst/programmer with the Pollak Library Systems Team at California State University, Fullerton. I came to The Carpentries through a champion I met at a Code4Lib conference. From there I found practitioners in the University of California system where I could start as a learner and progress to helper, Instructor, and now Instructor Trainer. I have always been interested in technology as an efficiency multiplier, and I think the skills inculcated by The Carpentries are of value to all knowledge workers of the future. We will come to look upon the ability to leverage data in decision making the same way we expected everyone to use email decades ago.
Dimitrios Theodorakis
I am a Scientific Software Engineer at the Met Office in the United Kingdom, working on various weather and climate software. My background is in education having been a secondary school science teacher in the UK before moving to the Met Office. I joined The Carpentries community after attending software training sessions at the UK Research Software Engineering conference in 2023, and look forward to helping spread The Carpentries’ work in my own organisation and internationally as an Instructor Trainer. I am also an editor for The Carpentries Lab, contributor to the Workbench, and a lesson-incubator (for Fortran!).
Elizabeth Ernestina Godoy Lozano
Ernestina Godoy holds a Pharmaceutical Chemistry and Biology degree from the Faculty of Chemical Sciences at the Autonomous University of San Luis Potosí, Mexico. She completed her Master’s in Basic Biomedical Sciences at the Faculty of Medicine of the same university. She earned her PhD in Public Health Sciences with a concentration in Infectious Diseases from the National Institute of Public Health in Mexico. Ernestina is based in Cuernavaca, Mexico, where she serves as the Head of the Department of Bioinformatics in Infectious Diseases at the National Institute of Public Health. She became involved with The Carpentries through her passion for teaching bioinformatics and programming languages, which she considers an essential part of her professional life. As a certified Carpentries Instructor, she is dedicated to empowering researchers and students with the skills to analyse health and disease big data. Dr. Godoy is also a founding member of R-Ladies Cuernavaca, and her research interests include antibody repertoire analysis, comparative genomics, and metagenomics in the context of public health.
Erin Graham
I am an eResearch Specialist working for James Cook University, Townsville, Australia and associated with The Queensland Cyber Infrastructure Foundation (QCIF), a non-profit organisation providing digital infrastructure capabilities for Queensland researchers. With a background in research and a commitment to fostering collaborative learning environments, I am excited to join the community of Instructor Trainers and contribute to the growth of The Carpentries.
Fenne Riemslagh
Fenne Riemslagh is part of the Coordinator Training Programme at the Netherlands eScience Center. She has a background in biomedical sciences and received her PhD at the department of Clinical Genetics at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam. The aspects of her job that she really loves are teaching, presenting, collaborating with other scientists, sharing expertise, and having open discussions.
Giorgia Mori
Giorgia is a Training & Communication Officer based in Sydney, Australia. With a background in microbiology and bioinformatics, she is affiliated with the Australian BioCommons. She became involved with The Carpentries through her passion for teaching computational skills and fostering diversity in the programming community. As a Carpentries Instructor, she is dedicated to empowering researchers by developing their computational and data management skills for efficient, reproducible research. As an Instructor Trainer, with strong ties to her Italian heritage, she is committed to expanding The Carpentries’ presence in Italy by forming a community of new Instructors. Giorgia is also actively involved with the RLadies, supporting gender minorities in programming, and in her spare time, she enjoys teaching yoga and exploring new places with friends and family.
Halle Burns
Halle Burns (she/her) is a Research Data Management Specialist based in the United States. With a background in research data management, data curation, metadata models, and inclusive pedagogy, she is affiliated with Princeton University. She became involved in The Carpentries in 2018 during graduate school at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, through her enrollment in their Library and Information Sciences Program. She is passionate about teaching technical skills in more accessible and approachable ways and is excited to be joining the Instructor Trainer community. In her spare time, Halle enjoys playing video games, ice skating, reading, and creating her own chainmail and jewelry.
Jesse Sadler
I am a Digital Humanities Trainer and Project Consultant at the University Library at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia. I received my Ph.D. in European History from UCLA. My research focuses on merchant families in early modern Europe. Coming from a Humanities background, I became interested in The Carpentries to help build technical skills outside of traditional STEM courses and fields. I became a Carpentries Instructor in 2021. I am also the Maintainer of the Data Carpentry R for Social Scientists lesson. I am passionate about making digital methodologies more approachable to diverse audiences, especially to those who might feel alienated by the foreignness of computer jargon or the Data Science tool chain.
Joel Nitta
I am an associate professor at Chiba University, Japan. While my primary research interest is systematic botany, I am also passionate about reproducible, open science. I first became involved with The Carpentries as a learner during my PhD, then became an Instructor when I started teaching. I am very excited to establish and grow The Carpentries in Japan, where it is only just getting started. To that end, I am also active in developing and supporting internationalisation in The Carpentries, which I sincerely believe is needed to achieve the vision of The Carpentries as a global organisation that is accessible to all. In my spare time I enjoy running, hiking, and tabletop games.
Kaija Gahm
Kaija is a PhD student at University of California, Los Angeles, studying movement ecology and animal social behavior using computational methods. Her research focuses on movement patterns and social information transfer in vultures. She took The Carpentries’ Instructor Training in 2021 while working in data science before starting grad school and has been teaching Carpentries workshops ever since. At UCLA, Kaija runs the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology’s “Hacky Hours” collaborative coding space, and she recently started developing a Carpentries lesson on minimal reproducible examples in R. Kaija loves teaching with The Carpentries because of the focus on solid pedagogy methods, and because she wants to empower scientists with the computational tools they need to do their research. When she’s not coding, teaching, or doing research, you can find Kaija organising with the UC grad student workers union, hiking a mountain, knitting a sweater, or cooking dinner with friends.
May Chan
May Chan is the Head Librarian of Metadata Services at the University of Toronto, Canada. She has been a Carpentries Instructor since 2017.
Oscar Masinyana
Oscar is the Communications Manager at The Carpentries, based in Johannesburg, South Africa. He joined The Carpentries in May 2023, drawn by its core values, its vision and mission, and its Code of Conduct to realise them. His decision to be an Instructor Trainer stems from his desire to find more ways to contribute to building and supporting the community which has given so much to sustaining The Carpentries’ mission. In his spare time he is engaged in the preservation of the 20 storey 80 years old heritage building that is home to him and his neighbours, and he is often found at jazz clubs, the theatre, and attending art exhibitions in and around Johannesburg.
Sarah Clarke
I am a Digital Training Specialist at ACENET in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. I develop and deliver training for researchers in Atlantic Canada to equip them with the technical skills they need for high-performance computing. I was originally introduced to The Carpentries as a learner, and, after joining ACENET, began helping in Carpentries workshops, became a certified Instructor, and now an Instructor Trainer. I’m passionate about improving tech literacy and making tools accessible to those who need them (or who don’t yet realise they do!). The Carpentries’ commitment to supporting the novice learner is one that I resonate with, and I’m excited to start teaching about teaching!
Scott Peterson
I am the Head of the Morrison Library and the Graduate Services Library in the Arts & Humanities Division of the Library at the University of California, Berkeley. I have been a part of the Carpentries since 2016 as an Instructor, workshop organiser, curriculum developer, discussion host, and now an Instructor Trainer. At UC Berkeley I wear many hats and I have worked on the Research Data Management team, helped run the Computational Text Analysis working group and Digital Humanities working group in the D-Lab, as well as run the Graphic Arts Loan Collection, an art lending program for students.
I have been active in the UC Carpentries community and organise the UC wide Carpentries series that take place across the University of California campuses each fall. My first introduction to programming was through Carpentries workshops in 2014 and these workshops showed me I could learn things I had no idea I wanted to learn or could learn. The Carpentries also introduced me to a great community that has fostered my desire to teach programming to humanists and scholars of all types over the last decade.
Silvia Di Giorgio
I am a Training and Community Manager based in Cologne, Germany, with a background in bioinformatics and microbiology. I started my journey with The Carpentries as a helper at the beginning of my PhD in 2017 and became an Instructor a year later. Since then, I have taken on various roles within the community, from helping, organising, and teaching workshops to assisting with the organisation of community events.
I love teaching and believe it is one of the most effective ways to learn. In my job, I am committed to empowering researchers through training and community-building initiatives while also focusing on enhancing their computational skills for more efficient and reproducible research. Over the years, I have actively participated in community efforts and contributed to various initiatives that align with these values.
I speak four languages, including Spanish, Italian, and German, which allows me to connect with diverse communities and foster collaboration across Europe. In my free time, I enjoy travelling with my husband and son, cooking, and playing board games.
Stéphane Guillou
Stéphane Guillou is a research software trainer at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia, on stolen Turrbal and Jagera land. He authored and maintains many Creative Commons-licensed training manuals on R, Python, LaTeX, Bash, Git, OpenStreetMap, QGIS, OpenRefine, Audacity and Voyant Tools. His interests include Open Research / Science (and Open Research Software specifically), the Commons, plants and our environment, sustainability, spatial data, and cycling.
Timothy B. Norris
In 2019 Timothy Norris joined the Institute for Data Science and Computing (IDSC) and the University of Miami Libraries as a Data Scientist with a joint appointment. His library-based interest lies in studying the flow of data throughout the entire research cycle from inception of the research question to the publication and preservation of the results. His own research focuses on geographic information systems (GIS) and geospatial data visualisations (cartography), participatory research methodologies, and how the sustainable governance of human, natural and informational resources intersect. The outcome of this work is to better understand the curation, management and governance of data resources and assets in research institutions at scales from local to global. This work forms part of a larger inter-disciplinary effort to provide data management services and support for digital scholarship at the University of Miami and beyond. He first participated in a Software Carpentry workshop in 2015 and since then the pedagogy, teaching materials, and engagement with the Carpentries community have become an integral part of his larger project.
Vasileios Panagiotis Lenis
I am an associate professor in Bioinformatics and Health Data Science Education at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. My research interests lie in a wide range of biological and biomedical sciences fields, from comparative genomics and evolutionary studies to neuroscience research and personalised medicine. I am mainly focused on the study of the molecular mechanism of neuropsychological disorders and brain tumours. Currently, I am focused on teaching in the MSc Health Data Science (HDS). I became a Carpentries Instructor in 2016 and regularly I am teaching in workshops related to bioinformatics and health data analysis in several universities across the UK and other European countries.