A new year, some new faces, and a look at what’s coming up for CSCCE in 2023

Happy New Year! 2023 promises to be a big one for CSCCE, and in this month’s newsletter we’re bringing you some updates on what we have up our sleeves.

New team members, new structure!
This is also our chance to introduce you to two new members of the CSCCE staff team: Cat Dayger and Maya Sanghvi. Cat, who comes to us from the Knight Cancer Early Detection Advanced Research (CEDAR) center in Portland, Oregon, is CSCCE’s new Director of Operations and Technology. And Maya, a recent graduate in cognitive science from Yale University, is the newest member of our training team.

These two new hires are part of a general expansion and evolution of the CSCCE staff team, and were made possible by increased demand for trainings, consultancy, and a new grant from the US National Science Foundation. Through refining our internal procedures as well as adding capacity to our team, we’re looking forward to working with more communities and community managers in STEM.

New year, new programs!
This year will also see the launch of the CSCCE Community Manager Certification Program, the start of the NSF POSE Training Program, free programming within our 500+ strong community of practice, and new collaborations and consultancy.

In this month’s newsletter:

Read a recap of our January community call, where our leadership team gave an overview of the year ahead
Get to know Cat and Maya, as well as how CSCCE is refining its organizational structure
Register your intent to enroll in CSCCE’s Community Manager Certification Program (enrollment dates and pricing now available)
Find out more about the Pathways to Open Source Ecosystems (POSE) Training Program
And a recent collaborative grant from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to support STEM community building in Latin America and Africa

CSCCE Community Manager Certification Program

CSCCE’s Community Manager Certification Program builds upon our foundational Scientific Community Engagement Fundamentals (CEF) course to create a longer-form, multi-component, online program to equip community managers and their organizations with skills and frameworks that ground their work in a community-centric leadership approach. Spots are currently available in both our April and September intakes, but we are capping each cohort at 25, so register your intent to enroll soon!

News and updates

New year, new org chart!

CSCCE’s staff team is evolving. We’ve updated our org chart to reflect these changes, and describe the composition of our three new teams: Operations, Training, and Communications. With two new hires onboard already this year, and two more to come, we’re working on refining our processes and employing technology solutions so that we can meet the needs of our clients, learners, collaborators, and community members.

Cat Dayger, Director of Operations and Technology

Cat connects ideas and people, combining effective communication, genuine leadership, and creative policy making toward helping science better serve society. With a background in team science and operations, she’s now working closely with Center Director Lou Woodley to oversee general operations and technology implementation and integration.

Maya Sanghvi, Junior Trainer and Curriculum Assistant

Maya is a recent graduate from Yale University, with a BS in cognitive science and an enthusiasm for education. At CSCCE, she will be supporting the delivery of online courses and client work. She’s also currently taking part in CSCCE’s Community Engagement Fundamentals course.

CSCCE’s plans for the next year

For our first community call of 2023, we wanted to continue our tradition of periodic updates about what’s happening at CSCCE. In this blog post recap, we summarize the contents on the call; from the ways community members can get involved in programming to the clients we will be working with this year. Take a look, and let us know if you have any feedback!

The NSF POSE Training Program

Last September, in collaboration with Karthik Ram at UC Berkeley, we received a grant from the US National Science Foundation to develop and deliver a new training curriculum for grantees of NSF’s Pathways to Open Source Ecosystems program. We are currently on track to launch the first cohort of this program in March, and a website for the program is in development.

Open science cloud infrastructure and training for communities in Latin America and Africa

In collaboration with 2i2c, The Carpentries, Invest in Open Infrastructure, MetaDocencia, and Open Life Science, we’ll be working on a project funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to create a collaborative cloud infrastructure service that enables community-based cloud-native workflows in the biosciences. We’ll be hosting a series of project kickoff meetings to align everyone around shared vocabulary and best practices for working together, which will be codified into core documentation such as a team playbook. And we’ll be supporting a newly-hired program manager for the project.

Consultancy

We partner with a growing number of organizations that host or fund scientific communities to advance their work in a variety of ways. We are excited to begin working with the Michael J Fox Foundation and the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities this year, as well as continuing our work with Bioconductor, rOpenSci, and the US Research Software Sustainability Institute.

Explore our consultancy offerings