I'm Leah đź‘‹

Executive Director & Founder of pyOpenSci

I break down technical and social barriers to open science so scientists everywhere can spend less time struggling with tools and more time advancing discovery.

Building Open Science Infrastructure.

pyOpenSci

Founder and Executive Director of an inclusive non profit organization. Together, our community that supports scientists in building, discovering and maintaining better scientific software. Together, we make open source accessible to everyone, everywhere.

  • 350+ contributors & maintainers
  • 50+ packages supported
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Passionate about Open Source

Accessible Open Education

I have 20+ years experience in designing technical training that tackles the hardest technical pain points—equipping scientists with the skills to work openly, reproducibly, and collaboratively. I have built over 300 open lessons for workshops, bootcamps, and semester-long courses at Universities and non profit organizations.

Community Matters Most

I have spent the last 9 years, creating and nurturing a vibrant scientific open source community of practice from the ground up—building the human infrastructure needed to ensure open science practices thrive. Helping people is at the heart of all of my work.

Open Source Steward

I am passionate about open source whether it’s Python, R or javascript, I love it all. At pyOpenSci we run an open peer review process to improve scientific software.

I maintain:

I also enjoy rebuilding maintainer teams.

What I've Built

Thousands of researchers trained • Hundreds of open lessons built • Hundreds of package maintainers supported

Program Design, Creation & Leadership

15+ years building national and global open science programs across research, education, and community infrastructure

  • pyOpenSci: Founder & Executive Director
  • Earth Data Analytics Professional Program, CU Boulder:
  • NEON Data Skills Program: A national program to help ecologist use large and diverse time series data.
  • Earth Data Science Corps: Program to increase data science teaching capacity at tribal colleges

20+ years experience developing accessible education content and programs

Education & Awards

  • Fellow: Python Software Foundation (2025)
  • PhD in Ecology, Penn State
  • Creator: 300+ open science lessons & workshops

Recent Talks

Recent Thoughts

open-science

Python's Reproducibility Crisis: And How We Fixed It for Open Science Education

The problem nobody (or everybody?!) talks about We obsess over reproducible analysis, version control, and open data. But there’s an earlier barrier that kills scientific momentum before research even begins: installation friction. If a scientist can’t install your tools, your open science dies on arrival. And the same is true for open education lessons and tutorials, too. I learned this the hard way when I switched from R to Python while building data science education programs.

science-communication

Using YouTube to Make Remote Sensing Data Accessible to Ecologists

The Challenge At the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) I built their NEON Data Skills program. Here, I faced a fundamental problem: ecologists weren’t ready for “big” data. NEON, funded by the National Science Foundation is an effort to build and now operate over 50 research sites across the United States. The data collected by NEON are massive and complex. But they also empower ecologists to use long-term, standardized datasets to track changes in our environment over many decades.