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Rexford, NY
Marcus D. Hanwell | Marcus leads the Open Chemistry project, developing open source tools for chemistry, bioinformatics, and materials science research. He completed an experimental PhD in Physics at the University of Sheffield, a Google Summer of Code developing Avogadro and Kalzium, and a postdoctoral fellowship combining experimental and computational chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh before moving to Kitware in late 2009. He is now a Technical Leader in the Scientific Computing group at Kitware, a member of the Blue Obelisk, blogs, @mhanwell on Twitter and is active on Google+. He is passionate about open science, open source and making sense of increasingly large scientific data to understand the world around us.
Authored Comments
Great links, and citizen science is an extremely interesting area that both empowers and informs wider society. It is important to find better ways to engage the public at large in scientific communication and research. I hope that by opening up more lines of communication that wider society will form a better understanding of how science really works, and be more inclined to both participate as well as considering the scientific merits of the information they consume.
I am very encouraged by the work Arfon is doing, along with changing attitudes from the funding agencies, foundations, and others in the wider community. This is an exciting time to be involved in scientific research, and I want to be a part of the change that improves the quality of software used for scientific research. We need to build communities, and find sustainable ways of encouraging more openness (data, source code, standards and publication/communication).
Thanks for a great article, there are many pressures on our time and it is important to define goals/get your priorities right. As someone who balanced open source with a B.Sc. and later a Ph.D. that was significantly easier than a wife, children and job! That said many of these points really resonated with me, I really enjoy working on open source, wish I had more time for it, but also need to prioritize work, family, exercise and fun! Volunteering as a moderator has been enormously rewarding, but was something I thought about quite a bit. Thanks Jason for writing this up, and Mark for sharing his thoughts!