In April 2017, the Mozilla Science Lab closed its third-annual call for fellows. Since that time we processed an impressive number of applications — from a record of 1090 impressive submissions. As in previous years, we conducted de-biased blind reviews, scheduled two- rounds of interviews and follow-ups, and evaluated a solid crew of top candidates according to their commitment to open science, their enthusiasm for learning by teaching, their project ideas for 2017-2018, and their engagement with a free and open web.
With generous support from the Siegel Family Endowment, we were able to select two fellows to further foster our support for open science, open access and open source initiatives throughout our network of leaders. For the next 10 months, we’ll provide benefits, project mentorship, and travel support to these fellows and they’ll engage actively with our community, develop new materials, curriculum, and tools to champion open science across the global Mozilla Network. After an intense several months of months of deliberation, we’re delighted to introduce the 2017 Mozilla Fellows for Science!
You can read their bios below to learn more about their passions and projects, and check them out on our 2017 Fellows’ page.
Amel Ghouila
A computer scientist by background, Amel earned her PhD in Bioinformatics and is currently a bioinformatician at Institut Pasteur de Tunis, where she works on the frame of the pan-African bioinformatics network H3ABionet supporting researchers and their projects while developing bioinformatics capacity throughout Africa. Amel is passionate about knowledge transfer and working open to foster collaborations and innovation in the biomedical research field. She is also passionate about empowering and educating young girls, she launched the Technovation Challenge Tunisian chapter to help Tunisian girls learn how to address community challenges by designing mobile applications.Follow her on Twitter @amelghouila and Github @amelgh.
Chris Hartgerink
Chris is an applied statistics PhD-candidate at Tilburg University, as part of the Metaresearch group. He has contributed to open science projects such as the Reproducibility Project: Psychology, tries to develop open-source software for scientists, and does research on detecting data fabrication in science. He is particularly interested in how the scholarly system can be adapted to become sustainable, healthy scholarly environment with permissive use of content, which also aligns the needs of science and scientists instead of creating a perverse system that promotes unreliable science. He initiated Liberate Science to work towards such a system.Follow him on Twitter @chartgerink or Github @chartgerink.
We’re excited to welcome these fellows from a mixture of social and computational sciences and from new global communities, and we hope you’ll have the opportunity to engage with their work in the year to come. As with our 2015 and 2016 cohorts, we look forward to nurturing these studies in the context of open science and the open web!
In late September, 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 healthy web. Follow the #mozfellows hashag to learn more about what we’re up to that week, listen for our fellows on the next Community Call (October 12th, 11:00 EST), and look for them at this year’s Mozfest (October 27-29th). We can’t wait to see what our new fellows do, and we’ll keep you posted!
Header Photo courtesy of Brigitte Tohm on Unsplash