Meet the many people behind Openscapes!

Openscapes is an source community with distributed leadership & collaboration,
supported in part by an intentionally small core team.

Openscapes Core Team

Julia Stewart Lowndes is a core Openscapes team member and founding director. She is a marine ecologist working at the intersection of actionable science, data science, and open science. She earned her PhD from Stanford University in 2012 studying drivers and impacts of Humboldt squid in a changing climate. In 2018 she founded Openscapes as an open source community following her own research team’s path to better science in less time, as a Mozilla Fellow and project scientist with the Ocean Health Index at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS), UC Santa Barbara. Email: julia at openscapes.org.

Stefanie Butland is a core Openscapes team member and co-leads Champions Cohorts. She is a research scientist by training and an open science and tech community builder by passion. Stefanie is a Fellow of the Center for Scientific Collaboration and Community Engagement. Email: stefanie at openscapes.org

Ileana Fenwick is a core Openscapes team member and leads the Pathways to Open Science program. She is an open science advocate and Marine Sciences Ph.D. Student at UNC Chapel Hill. Ileana’s research focuses on evaluating how marine communities respond to climate change and human impacts. Her work uses innovative quantitative methods to improve our ocean management outcomes. In addition to her research, Ileana is also a fierce advocate for HBCU engagement and equity in open science and marine science through her consulting and volunteer work.

Andy Teucher is a core Openscapes team member and develops software and cloud infrastructure. He is a biologist turned data scientist, specializing in helping people and organizations build maintainable, reproducible data workflows. Andy is a strong open data and open code advocate, and believes in the value of using and contributing to open-source software.

Mentors

NASA Earthdata Mentors are supporting colleagues and researchers using NASA Earthdata as they migrate workflows to the Cloud.

NOAA Fisheries Mentors are supporting colleagues at NOAA Fisheries with open science practices for collaboration, particularly for shared project management and government reports.

Pathways to Open Science Mentors support an annual remote event series for Black environmental & marine researchers to build community for the future of data intensive science. This is an ongoing collaboration with Black in Marine Science (BIMS), Black Women in Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Science (BWEEMS), HBCU marine science professors.

California Water Board / CalEPA Mentors are supporting colleagues to contribute to and inform the sustainable and equitable management of natural resources and identify opportunities for conservation action.

Advisors & Collaborators

Liz Neeley is an Openscapes collaborator and advisor. She is founding partner of Liminal, a science communication collective that focuses on sensemaking. She began her career in ocean conservation, where she learned the hard way that the data don’t speak for themselves. Ever since, she has focused on helping scientists find the courage and language they need to create change within themselves, their institutions, and the world. Liz is also a co-founder of SolvingFor.org and an external advisor to the Institute for Diversity Sciences and the Aspen Institute Science & Society Program, among others. She was previously Executive Director of The Story Collider.

Allison Horst is a long-time Openscapes advisor and collaborator. She is a data scientist, teacher, and artist. With a background in the fine arts, she also works digitally; see her Openscapes open landscapes in the gallery and her stats illustrations.

Erin Robinson is a long-time Openscapes collaborator and advisor, and core team member until 2024. She co-led the NASA Framework project and has been instrumental in scaling Openscapes with lessons learned from the NASA work, including developing our Flywheel. Erin works at the intersection of community informatics, Earth science and non-profit management.

Sean Kross is a long-time Openscapes collaborator and created the {kyber} R package to automate Openscapes cohort infrastructure. His interests are centered around understanding challenges that people doing data science face in the real world, expanding online educational opportunities to new audiences, and building tools to make the future of work and learning possible. Sean is also a frequent consultant for data analysis and software development projects, in addition to being an advocate for open data and a maintainer of several popular open source software repositories.

J.J. Allaire is a long-time Openscapes advisor and collaborator. As CEO of Posit (formerly RStudio), he is a software engineer and entrepreneur who builds tools that empower people with technology. J.J. has conceived and designed several industry leading products by balancing market, customer, and technical considerations, and by maintaining intimate involvement in all aspects of software design and construction.

Tara Robertson is an advisor and collaborator with Openscapes. She works with leaders to make companies more diverse, equitable and inclusive so that they can make inclusive and innovative products and services that the world needs. Tara is an intersectional feminist who uses data and research to advocate for equality and inclusion. She bring over 12 years experience leading change in open source technology communities, including 3 years leading Diversity and Inclusion at Mozilla. Her work on trans inclusion was featured in Forbes, her research on digitization ethics is included in Dr. Safiya Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression and an accessibility toolkit she co-authored won an international creative innovation award.

Incubators

The National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) helped incubate Openscapes. It conducts transformational science focused on informing solutions that will allow people and nature to thrive. Through data synthesis, collaborations, and open science, NCEAS accelerates scientific discoveries and generates big-picture insights to help solve environmental challenges. Established in 1995, NCEAS is an independent research affiliate of the University of California at Santa Barbara with a global network and impact.

Mozilla helped incubate Openscapes. It believes the internet must always remain a global public resource, open and accessible to all. Its work is guided by the Mozilla Manifesto. Mozilla focuses on fueling the movement for a healthy internet by supporting a diverse group of fellows working on key internet issues; by connecting open internet leaders at events like MozFest; by publishing critical research in the Internet Health Report; and by rallying citizens around advocacy issues that connect the well being of the internet directly to everyday life.