Welcome and Congratulations to Our New Board Members
We extend a huge thank you to all who contributed to completing the first NumFOCUS community-led board elections and would like to recognize the diligent service and leadership of the small but mighty volunteer-led Election Committee. They worked over eight months to plan and execute the election process in a fair, unbiased, and transparent manner. Documentation of the procedural details and community feedback collection are still underway.
The conclusion of the board elections ushers in a new NumFOCUS governance model consisting of a Technical Steering Committee serving alongside an Administrative Board of Directors. The model ensures projects have a voice in key governance decisions through the Technical Steering Committee. Their experience with project communities and understanding of project needs will guide committee oversight, influence budgets and strategic directions, and lead project selection. The Administrative Board will ensure financial health and legal compliance. Utilizing knowledge and experience in business practices and administration, they will support internal operations, guide oversight of leadership and relevant committees, and define a mission-driven strategic direction.
The 2024 Election adds three new members to the Administrative Board and seven to the Technical Steering Committee.
Join us in welcoming the following individuals to the NumFOCUS Governing Board!
Administrative Board of Directors
Julie Krugler Hollek
Dr. Julie Hollek has been a long-time user and champion of Scientific Python and the ecosystem. She is the co-chair of the SciPy Conference and has volunteered with the conference for 10 years. She previously served on NumFOCUS’ Diversity & Inclusion in Scientific Computing (DISC) committee. Julie earned her Ph.D. in Astronomy from the University of Texas at Austin and was most recently the Director of Data Science at Mozilla. At Mozilla, she led teams that leveraged the SciPy stack, set strategic direction for the organization, and managed budgets. Prior to Mozilla, Julie built the Health Data Science team at Twitter and is a subject matter expert at the intersection where trust and safety meets data. Throughout her career, Julie has been committed to improving diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging by community-building. She founded Neustar Women in Technology, supporting women technologists both internally and externally; was a PyLadies San Francisco organizer; and co-founded MozAPI, the Asian Pacific Islander employee resource group at Mozilla.
I’m thrilled to be joining the NumFOCUS board to help foster a connected, inclusive, and engaged community and to directly serve the projects that are the heart of open source scientific computing. Over the last ten years, l’ve attended and organized for the SciPy Conference and look forward to continuing the work I contributed there and bringing that perspective to the NumFOCUS board.
Mridul Seth
I am a scientific software developer at the European Spallation Source ERIC working on creating tools for neutron science.
Over the years I have been involved with multiple NumFOCUS projects like NetworkX, Econ-ARK, Scientific Python and projects around the open source scientific ecosystem. Over the past decade, NumFOCUS has achieved a great deal and it has been able to gain (and maintain) a critical mass in the wider scientific open source ecosystem. By serving on the administrative board, I would like to help sustain this momentum and secure a robust future for NumFOCUS and its projects.
I believe I can be a valuable addition to the administrative board and NumFOCUS can use our collective networks in the broader ecosystem to set strategic plans. By joining the board, I aim to leverage my experience and passion to further strengthen NumFOCUS and its impact on the scientific open source community.
I am honored to be elected to the NumFOCUS Administrative Board. Thank you all! I am excited to work with everyone in the NumFOCUS community to further its mission and support the amazing open-source scientific software projects under its umbrella.
Andy Terrel
Andy is a leader in the Python open data science community (PyData) with over 1,000 citations of his academic articles. He has worked on numerous foundational systems, including the Dask distributed computing framework, the Conda package manager, and the SymPy symbolic computing library. He has also been a leader at several companies in the space, including Anaconda and NVIDIA.
Technical Steering Committee
Tetsuo Koyama
I am a software engineer in Japan. I am interested in scientific computing and visualization with computer graphics. I am one of the main developers of the PyVista project (https://github.com/orgs/pyvista/people). I am passionate about open source conference management and support, serving on the SciPy Conference management staff and volunteering on the NumFOCUS Election Committee.
I am particularly interested in working with other Python ecosystems due to the need for PyVista projects, and I am thrilled to contribute to the overall benefit of Scientific Python.
There is something that I feel strongly about. That the investment in open source is still not sufficient in Asia. At last year’s PyCon, it was a big topic of conversation that only 1% of PSF investment was being made in Asia. The same is true of NumFOCUS, and the opinions of people in Asia are not being fully reflected. This is not a problem with PSF or NumFOCUS themselves, but rather, in my opinion, it is because the Pythonistas living in Asia are not able to deliver their opinions. For this reason, I decided to run for election in this area, where I can make use of my own expertise.
Juan Nunez-Iglesias
“I have been working in scientific open source since 2012, including serving on the steering council of two NumFOCUS sponsored projects, scikit-image and napari. And I have been thinking about open source sustainability for half that time, at least since co-organising a “”Funding Open Source”” birds-of-a-feather session at SciPy 2019. One of the great paradoxes of open source is that companies and universities will pay millions for proprietary software such as MATLAB, but will do nothing to support Scientific Python — where they are getting equally capable software *and* the source code, which gives them further capabilities and assurances. Instead, funding for scientific open source generally comes from various forms of “”begging””.
I will work to build mechanisms to help projects raise sustainable, recurring funding that comes from people *willingly paying for the value* provided by the project. I hope to put fundraising tools in the hands of projects, and projects in charge of their own destinies.
Jacob Schreiber
I am interested in serving on the technical steering committee for two reasons: my personal interest in open-source software, and my previous productive experiences with NumFOCUS. I have been involved in the open source ecosystem for over a decade now. During that time, I have served as a core developer for scikit-learn and also developed several widely used software packages of my own (apricot, pomegranate, tangermeme, ledidi, with the second two being more focused toward the genomics community). These works were supported by several small development grants from NumFOCUS, and the features implemented through these proposals are what made the projects successful. I have given dozens of talks on these works at conferences such as PyData, ODSC, and SciPy, and recently won the Stanford Open Science Innovator Award (https://datascience.stanford.edu/cores/awards) for my cumulative effort. In addition to writing general purpose packages, I have taken several projects written in a research setting and converted them to easy-to-use production code (tfmodisco-lite, bpnet-lite).
My view is that developing good software is a community effort and that this community thrives when everyone contributes; I would not be where I am today without open source software tools and aim to give back to this community whenever I can. The community response to my projects has solidified in my mind that open-source tool development is crucial for swift progress in every domain. As an incoming professor at UMass Chan Medical School, I plan to continue my development of tools and share my views with the next generation of students. I believe that I have the technical experience to contribute meaningfully to the committee and it would be an honor to be a part of the team.
NumFOCUS does critical work supporting the open-source community, and I’m thrilled to have an opportunity to help in these efforts as part of the Technical Steering Committee.
Eloisa Elias T.
I believe that open source software is important to the advancement of humanity. It is my dream that open source software can be as well known and used as Microsoft Excel, so that a young child from the jungles of Mexico can have the same access to the same powerful software and tools used by the top technology organizations in a first world country.
I am a data scientist and lead organizer for 6 inclusive data science communities, with an active, vibrant, and growing membership of 9500+ software engineers and data science enthusiasts. I collaborate with nonprofit tech organizations, city and state governments, and enterprises to promote diversity and inclusion programs to support women and minorities in the field.
• Founder of PyData Seattle meetup with 3100+ members (since 2016). Built the community from the ground up, from zero members. PyData Seattle focuses on helping data science enthusiasts learn in the areas of data science, data management, processing, analytics, and visualization. One goal of PyData Seattle is to increase the awareness of NumFOCUS.
• Chair of PyLadies Seattle with 2300+ members (since 2016). PyLadies is a worldwide group of women developers who use the Python programming language, with a local presence in Seattle.
• Lead Organizer of Seattle Spark + AI meetup with 4,100 members (since 2022).
• Founder of Women Techmakers Seattle (since 2022), Google’s program that provides visibility, community, and resources for women in technology.
• Lead Organizer of Google Developer Group Bellevue (since 2023).
• Lead Databricks MVP, Seattle chapter (since 2024).
In addition, I organize and host world-class events for the open-source community, with 146 events and over $1.4 million of funds raised to date. I also develop scholarship programs to increase the participation of women and minorities at these events, and have provided 730 scholarship grants to date.”
I am filled with immense gratitude and love. Thank you for entrusting me with this responsibility. To me, this role is more than just an honor; I am committed to leading with integrity, innovating with passion, and dedicating myself to serve our great open source community.
Sanket Verma
I have been involved with the NumFOCUS and PyData community for the last eight years. I have been super active with the community building and fostering PyData culture throughout the Indian region. I’m currently leading the efforts at PyData Delhi which organised the first PyData conference in India in 2017. This event led to the foundation of many new PyData chapters throughout the country. Since 2017, I have co-chaired 6 PyData conferences (Delhi and Global) and organised 40+ meet-ups in collaboration with startups and organisations throughout Delhi-NCR — helping raise over $300k+ for projects under NumFOCUS. I have been involved with NumFOCUS for an extended period and was awarded the NumFOCUS Community Leadership Award in 2022 for my efforts.
Throughout the years, I have transitioned from using the PyData stack to contributing. Currently, I take care of all things OSS and the community at Zarr (a NumFOCUS sponsored project). I also serve on the SPEC (https://scientific-python.org/specs/steering-committee/) and OSSci steering committees.
Working with Zarr has provided me with insights into the inner workings and intricacies of the open-source ecosystem. Many projects share similar aspects, including the needs of maintainers and contributors, codebase management, packaging and versioning, governance structures and code of conduct. Additionally, both technical and non-technical needs — such as CI/CD resources, infrastructure support, grant funding, and organizing sprints or hackathons — can be addressed by creating specific processes and mechanisms.
Contributing to various projects within the Scientific Python ecosystem has taught me valuable lessons about taking the necessary steps to resolve issues effectively.”
Wolf Vollprecht
I have been involved with many open source projects, as hobbies or professionally and have always been driven by a (scientific) curiosity and the ability to have an outsized impact through open source. Since I believe in the outsized impact of open source, open science and open knowledge, I also believe that we should allocate funds as efficiently as possible to maximize this impact.
I have helped the NumFOCUS community by setting up the new (and novel) PackagingCon conference under the NumFOCUS umbrella, I have served as a conda-forge core member for the past ~4 years and as an inaugural member of the conda community (where I am most involved).
I can also rely on my experience at QuantStack (a small open source consulting business where I was CTO) and my experience at prefix.dev, a startup where I am the founder and CEO.
Sophia Yang
Sophia Yang is the Head of Developer Relations at Mistral AI, a leading open-source AI lab. In this role, she leads developer education, developer ecosystem partnerships, and community engagement. Deeply passionate about the open-source Python and AI community, she has contributed to numerous open-source projects and regularly speaking at events focused on open-source initiatives. She is committed to empower open-source community growth and learning.
She is also a strong advocate for NumFocus, having volunteered with the organization for several years. Her contributions include serving on the steering committee for the NumFocus project HoloViz, being a member of the project incubator team, participating in the small development grants review committee, co-chairing SciPy tutorials, and co-chairing PyData Global. She looks forward to continuing her contributions to open-source and NumFOCUS.
