2019: Benjamin Carr

Governance Board Elections
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This thread is for the 2019 Community Seat election for the Board of Directors of the Open Humans Foundation. Below you will find the introduction for the candidate and have the opportunity to ask them any questions you might have for them.

Benjamin’s introduction:
I have been involved with and contributing to open source software, and like-minded communities for over 20 years now. I, like others, in OH am a firm believer in open science, open data, and open access. I was an early enrollee in Harvard-PGP, excited by the promise of enabling precision medicine and an open dataset for researchers to use. I hold a Ph.D. in biology from Boston University and have worked professionally in academic, NGO, government, and private industry.

My expertise bridges multiple areas of science having worked in oceanography, satellite remote sensing, AUVs, marine biology, and bioinformatics, as well as being involved with the 9/11 impact assessment of the Hudson River. I have also been running the OH Facebook account for the last two years. In 2018 I was lucky enough to have a hand in facilitating and doing QA/QC on a portion of the NIH Data Commons Pilot Phase Consortium, and have high hopes that at least one fully open source stack emerges from that endeavor.

Links:
https://twitter.com/BenjaminHCCarr


https://www.linkedin.com/in/bencarr/

Questions
Please feel free to post your questions for Benjamin below!

#2

Hi Open Humans Community,
Thanks to @gedankenstuecke and @madprimefor organizing this.

I defended my Ph.D. in Sept 2017 from Boston University, was an NOAA-SeaGrant Knauss Marine Policy Fellow, and have worked for Universities, NGOs, and in the Private Sector, most recently as a Whole Human Genome Research Scientist.

My background crosses over many scientific disciplines: Marine Bio, Ecology and Conservation, Biological and Physical Oceanography, HPC, and Human Genome work. My interests as a carrier lie at the intersection of science, technology, and policy.

I have been involved with PGP for over a decade and attended a couple of the GET conferences in Boston, so we may have met in real life. I have been working with Open Humans for a number of years, contributing the odd code and pull request, as well as managing the OH Facebook Group for the last 2 years, for better or worse I make sure that a science-y story is delivered to the Facebook Group every day at 3:43pm Eastern!

My interest in joining the board centers around being someone who has been involved in bioinformatics and genetics from the outside and inside, someone who believes in open-science, open-source and open-data. I bring a breadth of experience from multiple laboratory, government, and field science settings, as well as experience working with NIH from within a private company, contracted to work on the NIH DCPPC.

I hope you will support my nomination to the board and I am happy to answer any questions you may have.

I am a regular on the slack channel, and have subscribed to this post if you want to post questions here.

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