Introducing… Sarah Gibson

What’s your name?

Sarah Gibson

What’s your background?

I hold a PhD in Astrophysics which is where I first learned to code, but joining the Turing’s Research Engineering team really sparked my interest in best practices, community building, reproducibility and open science.

I’m very active in the open source community contributing to a couple of projects. The Turing Way is community built online handbook for various aspects of data science, including reproducibility. It collects together how-to guides, best practices and impact stories around building successful data science projects. Binder is a project that tackles the technical aspects of reproducibility by combining commonly used tools, such as Jupyter Notebooks, to produce a service for hosting reproducible computational analyses in the cloud allowing anyone to access to them by clicking a link in their browser.

What’s your role on the project?

I’m a Research Software Engineer on the project and I’d like to apply my skills to support the researchers in implementing best practices when writing and communicating their analyses and results, making them as reproducible as possible and automating them where appropriate.

What excites you about the project?

The interdisciplinarity and collaborative nature of the project really excites me. It will be an incredible experience to bring this dataset to life by pulling together so many different perspectives and kinds of expertise.

What challenges do you see ahead?

I think the scale of the project will be the biggest challenge. Keeping track of all of the people and different types of research so they can be brought together into one cohesive vision is no mean feat, but will be very rewarding.

What’s the last (non-work) book you read, exhibition or performance you saw?

I’m currently reading Data Feminism and enjoying the accompanying reading group as well.

Finally, where can people find out more about your and your work?

My personal webpage hosts descriptions of my project work and blog posts about what I get up to. I also tweet a fair bit as @drsarahlgibson.