Fellow Feature: Nicholas Judd
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 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, ‘Open Matrices Stimuli Set: A Freely Available Resource for Cognitive Testing’ led by Nicholas Judd, a postdoctoral researcher at the Lifespan Cognitive Dynamics lab.
What is the goal of your project?
Fluid reasoning is the ability to figure out abstract, novel problems not reliant on specific knowledge. Individual differences in this ability predict school success, longevity and morbidity, socio-economic outcomes and mental and physical health. However, “gold standard” tests such as the Raven’s Matrices and Cattell Culture Fair test are expensive, preventing access by less well-resourced countries, practitioners, and labs, and have a limited number of items, preventing use in longitudinal or ‘experience sampling’ studies. The Open Matrices project will (1) develop, (2) validate and (3) make available an effectively unlimited set of fluid reasoning items to the global community.
What role does research software play in your daily activities?
The Open Matrix Stimuli Set plays a constant role in my daily activities. We are still in the process of developing and testing it.
What initially inspired you to apply to the Fellowship Programme at the eScience Center?
It looked like a great cohort of inspiring open science researchers, and I wanted to be part of it!
How is your Fellowship helping you promote the use of research software in your own community?
In addition to the contact hours and monetary benefits, this fellowship helps by acting as a seal of approval for open science work. Open science work commonly does not result in ‘quantifiable metrics’, yet a fellowship is a tangible win to point at.
What have you enjoyed, thus far, during your Fellowship at the eScience Center?
I really enjoyed our workshop day in Amsterdam. It was great to meet like-minded, inspiring open science researchers.
Keeping this project in mind, what do you hope to do after your Fellowship?
After my fellowship, I plan to continue researching how cognition develops across the lifespan.
What do you hope will change in the use of research software in your community after your Fellowship?
After we complete the Open matrices stimuli set, I hope the community takes the new tool onboard and it solely replaces the existing expensive, copy-written stimuli.
What would you say to people who are interested in applying for future Fellowship Programmes?
Go for it! The non-monetary benefits are exceptional, and it is very inspiring (and motivational) to be part of a generation of scientists trying to change science for the better.
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.