Fellow Feature: Mara Bialas
Every year, the Netherlands eScience Center shares a call for applications for our Fellowship Programme. The Programme is aimed at members of the academic research community who are passionate about acting as ambassadors for the use of research software. It is for individuals who have the ambition to promote or improve the use of research software within their organization or discipline. Our 2024-2025 fellows are currently halfway through their fellowship yeaEvery year, the Netherlands eScience Center shares a call for applications for our Fellowship Programme. The Programme is aimed at members of the academic research community who are passionate about acting as ambassadors for the use of research software. It is for individuals who have the ambition to promote or improve the use of research software within their organization or discipline. Our 2024-2025 fellows are currently halfway through their fellowship year. What better time to showcase their progress over the course of their programme.
We will present you with interviews with each of the Fellows. From creating tutorials to organizing interactive seminars, our Fellows are at the forefront of shaping the landscape of research software practices.
Keep reading to learn more about the progress of the project, ‘Turtle and Hare Workshops: Exchanging software skills from beginner to experienced’ led by Mara Bialas, a PhD candidate at Radboud University.
What is the goal of your project?
TAHWS (Turtle and Hare Workshop) is a platform that connects beginner software users (“turtles”) with advanced users (“hares”) to enhance research projects through sharing open-source software skills. The goal is to promote open-source software among researchers.
Users can create profiles listing public contact information, software skills they want to learn, and skills they can teach. The platform matches users with others who fit their learning or teaching needs and facilitates connections. We will also proactively, via email, match users with each other. After being matched, participants are encouraged to collaborate on a small project in 3-5 meetings, with final presentations and prizes.
What role does research software play in your daily activities?
I work in experimental psychology, which involves a lot of task design and coding.
How is your Fellowship helping you promote the use of research software in your own community?
Visibility: Whether the project will work out as intended or not, I think that even advertising it and introducing people to open-source software may reduce the threshold for using it.
What have you enjoyed, thus far, during your Fellowship at the eScience Center?
I enjoy that you can come up with any idea from any background. Then, you get paired with a Fellow for support and advice while working on that idea.
What are some challenges that you have faced throughout your project, thus far? How have you overcome these obstacles?
People are usually quite keen on the idea but motivating them to spend more time improving their skills is dfficult, especially if the skills are not immediately relevant to their own work.
Keeping this project in mind, what do you hope to do after your Fellowship?
When my Fellowship is finished, I will be close to completing my PhD in experimental psychology. So, afterward, I am interested in starting a postdoc but am also open to looking into policy advisory or more commercial positions in which I can improve my coding skills.
What would you say to people who are interested in applying for future Fellowship Programmes?
I would recommend it but advise integrating it with something you are already working on.
Who are we?
The eScience Center is a research organization dedicated to applying research software to answer research questions in any scientific domain through project collaborations. It has the largest concentration of dedicated, high-level research software expertise in the Netherlands. The eScience Center also has a fellowship programme and makes all of its software and training materials openly available online. For more information about what we offer, visit esciencecenter.nl.