This week, Emily Lescak joined the CSCCE staff team. She is taking on the role of Project and Community Manager for the POSE Training Program, working to support program participants and ensure smooth operations behind the scenes. We’re so happy to have Emily join our team! Please read on for a little more about her work, past and future.
About Emily
Emily comes to CSCCE from the Wikimedia Foundation, where, as Senior Research Community Officer, she developed a multi-year strategy for growing, diversifying, and supporting the global community of researchers working on Wikimedia projects, co-organized an annual virtual research workshop, and co-developed a new funding program to support international cohorts of researchers. Previously, she developed and managed Code for Science and Society’s Event Fund. She took CSCCE’s Community Engagement Fundamentals course in 2021 and has been an active member of the community for more than three years.
Emily holds a PhD in fisheries and Masters degrees in teaching and biology. She was a fisheries scientist in Alaska in both academic and government sectors before transitioning to non-profit tech in 2020. She is passionate about making science more accessible and inclusive.
“CSCCE has played a valuable role in helping me build my career over the last few years and I’m excited to now be part of the team driving forward the new POSE training program and supporting open-source leaders.”
At CSCCE, Emily will initially be fully immersed in the POSE Training Program. This NSF-funded program, which we are running in collaboration with Karthik Ram at UC Berkeley, supports awardees of NSF’s Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems (POSE) program. The current pilot version of the training program involves more than 70 participants, all working to build sustainable open-source projects.
If you’re interested in learning more about the POSE Training Program, please visit the website!
As project manager for the program, Emily will work closely with our Director of Operations and Technology, Cat Dayger, to ensure the training program is delivered effectively, and that various stakeholders in the program are kept up-to-date on how things are going. As community manager, she will take ownership of the nascent community of practice we are nurturing with these open-source leaders. Each new cohort of the program will join the community, which is hosted on Slack, ensuring its continued growth, and Emily will work to foster connections both within and across these cohorts. Additionally, we’ll be hosting an unconference in the second year of the grant, and Emily will be key in ensuring this is a community-driven event.