A little less than two months ago, the Mozilla Science Lab closed its second-annual call for fellows. During that time we processed an impressive number of applications — from a record of 483 submissions –, conducted de-biased blind reviews, scheduled two- rounds of interviews and follow-ups, and evaluated a solid set of around 138 top candidates according to their engagement with open science, their enthusiasm for learning by teaching, and their commitment to a free and open web.

With generous support from the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust, we fund the four chosen fellows to build open science, open access, and open source practice throughout their networks. We provide extensive benefits, funding, and a travel subsidy to stage our fellows as champions of open science; in exchange they spend ten months developing new materials, projects, tools, and trainings to provide avenues for open science initiatives at their institutions and across the global Mozilla network. The caliber of applicant for these fellowships is so high that our process for evaluating them is extremely thorough, and incredibly tough to execute. In equal measure challenging and inspiring, the deliberation process has finally brought us to the announcement we’ve been waiting to make! It is our pleasure to introduce the 2016 Mozilla Fellows for Science!

Read their abbreviated bios below to learn more about their impressive backgrounds, research projects, and ambitions, and check out their extended bios on our 2016 Fellows’ page.

Teon is a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Reproducible Neuroscience and the Department of Psychology at Stanford University. He is a core developer for MNE, a community-driven project for analyzing time-series brain data in Python; and OpenEXP, an open science platform founded to be a “GitHub for Experiments” and a tool for running both behavioral and physiological experiments using open-source web-based tools.

Follow him on Twitter @teon_io and Github @teonbrooks.

Kirstie is a postdoctoral researcher in the Brain Mapping Unit at the University of Cambridge. She studies adolescent brain development and is particularly interested in the emergence of mental health disorders during the teenage years. She’s the founder and lead developer of the STEMM Role Models project which provides a database of experts from traditionally under-represented groups to ensure conference organizers are able to invite the most diverse and exciting speakers to their events.

Follow her on Twitter @Kirstie_J or Github @KirstieJane.

Bruno is a bioinformatics and population genomics PhD student at WurmLab (Queen Mary University of London) and a Node.js web developer. He founded the open source community Bionode.io with the goal of improving modularity and reusability of tools and code in bioinformatics by leveraging innovation coming from the Node.js and Web communities. He’s also involved with Dat (“git for data”) and BioJS (“biological data visualization on the web”).

Follow him on Twitter @bmpvieira and Github @bmpvieira.

Danielle is a cell biologist and Neuroscience PhD candidate at Oregon Health and Science University passionate about improving reproducibility and digital literacy in the sciences. She studies the role of phosphoinositide signaling in myelination in her dissertation project, collects terabytes of microscopy data, loves fancy microscopes, and enjoys policy work. She also co-organizes Science Hack Day Portland, and  Open Insight PDX.

Follow her on Twitter @daniellecrobins and Github @daniellecrobinson.

You’ll notice some themes in this cohort: a mixture of neuro, bio, and psychological studies; a passion for community-building programs both online and IRL; applications of version control, replicability, and web tech to scientific purpose. As with our 2015 cohort, we look forward to nurturing these studies in the context of open science and the open web!

This week, we’ll convene for a week-long onboarding at the Mozilla Toronto office with the Open Web Fellows, their partners in support of an open, accessible, secure, and science-ful web. Stay tuned on the #mozfellows16 hashag to learn more about what we’re up to this week, listen for our fellows on the next Community Call (October 13th, 11:00 EST), and look for them at this year’s Mozfest (October 28-30th). We can’t wait to see what our new fellows do, and we’ll keep you posted!