Data Science Champions
We kindly acknowledge and highlight the following people for their efforts and/or initiatives that help promote data science at EMBL and ultimately nurture this community.
Could you share a brief testimonial about how you interact(ed) with the Data Science community at EMBL?
Sudeep Sahadeva
“I have been helping to organise the EMBL Python User Group (EPUG) sessions, where we try to bring Pythonistas at EMBL together to share knowledge and discuss on interesting topics.
Mahnoor Zulfiqar
“I have been actively involved in the Data Science community by presenting at coding clubs, organizing EPUG (the Python coding club), and participating in data science, open science, and workflow meetings. Additionally, I will be supporting the Python beginner course in March 2025 as a helper.”
Gorka Bravo Martinez
“Volunteering as a Python trainer with EMBL’s Bio-IT team taught me about teaching, organizing a training program, and creating structured and individualized training materials for life sciences.
I had the opportunity to meet scientists from a range of life sciences domains, which helped me identify and attempt to resolve typical challenges that life scientists have when programming in Python, processing data, or analyzing data.”
Eleonora Mastrorilli
“Since 2023, I restarted (together with Lauren Saunders, Mike Smith and Federico Marotta) the emblR coding club, a bi-weekly meetup for the R coding community at EMBL. Since then, I’m an emblR organizer and active session presenter. I also actively try to expand the scope of this community activity beyond EMBL Heidelberg to a pan-EMBL initiative, with some success involving EMBL-EBI and EMBL-Rome. Over the years I contributed to several internal and external R and bash courses as both helper and teacher, and I am a certified Carpentry instructor. More recently, I joined the Data Science and Open Science meetings. This in turn motivated me to learn how to implement and contribute to best practices within my group by developing case-specific guidelines and providing individual support as needed.”
Thomas Weber
“As an ARISE fellow hosted at the Data Science Centre, I had the opportunity to interact and collaborate with various people from different workstreams. I contributed to the migration of existing services to new technologies and developed new services myself to be shared with the Data Science community, particularly in the areas of scientific workflows and data management.”
Benedikt Best
“As a software engineer in the Kreshuk group, I develop tools – primarily ilastik – to make machine learning accessible for image analysis without requiring coding skills. Besides teaching courses about ilastik and supporting users, I help out in general data science and software courses when possible.”
Felix Schneider
“Together with Sarah Kaspar I do statistical consulting for all EMBL members/employees. Furthermore together with Christian Tischer and his team I engange in teaching on how to analyse and handle imaging data also in the context of python. Furthermore I co-develop together with Christian Tischer and his team teaching material for handling imaging data.”
Grzegorz Chojnowski
“I develop tools for structure determination, prediction and analysis and train in their use.”
Jure Pečar
“As HPC admin I closely monitor all the data processing that’s going on there and pay attention to any performance issues that appear. I analyze them and issue recommendations on how to improve or rearrange the problematic task.”
Josep Moscardo (Alumnus)
“Working with the Data Science Community was an exciting opportunity to explore new technologies and support the evolving needs of EMBL. One of my most interesting projects was building our S3 storage system to efficiently store terabyte-sized microscope images, making them seamlessly accessible through a Fiji plugin that one of our colleague wrote.”
Federico Marotta
“The main way I interact with the Data Science community is by using and learning from all the courses and infrastructure it offers. First and foremost, I strive to follow the best practices in my own work by using git, keeping the data organized, and testing my code, even if it takes some additional time and effort. Whenever possible, I am always happy to give something back to the community. I have assisted the Data Science team in teaching two programming courses, one for R and the other for Python, an enriching experience that I would recommend to anyone. Over the past year I have been co-organizing the EmblR club, a biweekly meeting where R enthusiasts discuss interesting packages or good programming practices. But equally important to me is the social aspect: I contribute to keeping the community entertained and sharp-minded by developing (together with Renato) the Trivia session, a pub-quiz game that takes place regularly in our internal Mattermost chat. All in all, I can say that the Data Science Centre has definitely improved the quality of both science and life here at Embl, at least for me!”
Michal Muransky
“Working as a Systems Engineer, I’m supporting the Data Science community by
ensuring their apps and workloads run smoothly and efficiently in Kubernetes cluster.”