Dr. Arfon Smith Link to Dr. Arfon Smith
Dr. Arfon Smith is a Senior Fellow at Schmidt Sciences on the Science Systems team. His current interests span research software and the evolving role of research software engineers – including how generative AI is reshaping the practice and identity of research software engineering – research data-management infrastructure, and AI as a science accelerator, from differentiable simulation codes and ML surrogates to new models for automation, participation, and innovation in research. Arfon is also the founder and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS), a co-founder of the Zooniverse citizen-science platform, and holds a visiting appointment at the Space Telescope Science Institute.
Prior to Schmidt Sciences, Arfon was a Director of Product at GitHub, where he led AI product development including GitHub Copilot. With extensive product, data science, and engineering background – especially in open source – he loves building deep partnerships across product, design, data science, and engineering and is fluent in the language of each. Arfon has led teams across organizations of varied sizes, scales, and sectors, including founding and leading the Data Science Mission Office at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, home of the James Webb Space Telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope.
Dr. Kirsty Pringle Link to Dr. Kirsty Pringle
Dr Kirsty Pringle is a researcher at the Software Sustainability Institute, based at EPCC, University of Edinburgh.
Before joining the SSI, Kirsty was a climate scientist and held roles at the Met Office, the Max Planck Institute, and the University of Leeds, where she developed and tested climate models. Through this she discovered the world of research software engineering and hasn’t looked back!
Her current work brings together her interests in environmental sustainability and research software engineering, with a focus on embedding sustainability into digital research. She is founder and chair of the Green Research Software Special Interest Group.
Kirsty is also a NetDRIVE champion, focusing on green software engineering and building a community of practice around sustainable research computing. Through NetDRIVE she co-authored the Advocacy for Sustainable Research open-access course, which helps researchers build institutional support for more sustainable research practices.
Her writing on sustainable digital research includes It’s time to decarbonise digital research, published in Research Professional News.
Kirsty is also passionate about public engagement. She co-developed the Air Quality Stripes graphics, which transform historical air quality data into striking, accessible visualisations.
April Johnson Link to April Johnson
April Johnson is the Community and People Lead at 2i2c, a nonprofit building open, interactive computing infrastructure - primarily JupyterHub and Jupyter Book - for research and education communities. 2i2c’s strategy holds that science and education impact is mostly social, not technical, so her work centers on building network effect between member communities rather than solving each community’s needs in isolation.
Beyond 2i2c, she serves on the Jupyter Community Building Committee, supporting the community around the Jupyter tools that power interactive computing across science and education — the same ecosystem 2i2c’s infrastructure runs on. She also sits on the PyOpenSci Executive Council, at the level of the broader scientific Python ecosystem that Jupyter and 2i2c’s members depend on. Together, these roles put her building social infrastructure at intersecting scales - one organization, one tool ecosystem, one discipline - on the same premise: open source in science survives on the strength of its community, not just its code.
Prior to 2i2c, April was Global Head of Transformation & Change at Thoughtworks, a global technology consultancy, where she led complex changes across 14 countries. That work shaped her lasting interests: coaching individuals and teams, understanding how people adopt new ways of working, and designing structures for shared decision-making - skills she now spends on the communities that keep open scientific computing running.