What is your current role? Tell us a bit about your work or line of research
My current role is program coordinator for the Computational Biodiversity Science and Services (BIOS²) training program, based at the University of Sherbrooke, in Canada. The goals of the program involve widening opportunities and skill sets among students and postdoctoral fellows, while fostering a new culture in ecoinformatics based on open science.
Why did you choose to participate in the ASAPbio Fellows program?
I chose to participate in the ASAPbio Fellows program because I am always involved in discussions about open access in scientific publications, and I have been advocating for preprints and preprint reviews for many years now. I believe the Fellows program will expand the way I think and advocate for open publications, and help me implement some projects in my work aimed at graduate students.
What are you excited about in science communication?
When I was in high school and my sister was in college, she showed me the SciELO portal, where she was looking for scientific publications that she’d use on her essays. It was fascinating to me how we could have access to scientific information like that, written by scientists, but at the same time I was confused by the fact that the researchers who wrote those reports were often Brazilian, but the reports were never in Portuguese, and therefore many Brazilians couldn’t really access that information, even though it was available. And this questioning stuck with me until this day, and yet I still find fascinating when we can have access to new scientific results and the discussions around them, while I’m still getting intrigued by how “access” means different things in different contexts.
Ask me about…
… group facilitation!