Malvika Sharan
SSI fellow
European Molecular Biology Laboratory
Interests
My interests lie in the intersection of community building, bio-computation, and the inclusion of historically underrepresented groups in STEM. In my SSI fellowship project, I want to specifically focus on identifying and developing effective training strategies in the low-income research environment (i.e. limited resources, lack of funding, etc.).
My work
I am a community outreach coordinator at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), Heidelberg. I manage outreach and community engagement plans for the Bio-IT project, which is an open platform to facilitate knowledge exchange related to bioinformatics topics between EMBL researchers. As a deputy training coordinator at ELIXIR Germany, a part of my job is to coordinate the dissemination of bioinformatics training and outreach resources developed in EMBL to the ELIXIR member states.
During my SSI fellowship period, I will be working with the researchers, developers, and users of Intrinsically Disorder Protein (IDP) bioinformatics to understand the needs of training and capacity building in the community. There is a lack of centralized learning resources for IDP that makes learners and members from outside this field depend on international conferences or workshops to exchange knowledge with the IDP researchers. To address this issue, I will facilitate contributions from both developers and learners to build centralized learning resources using best practices that I have learned from my participation in the Open Science communities such as SSI, Mozilla, and The Carpentries.
My main focuses in this project will be the following:
- Developing Open Science curriculums and central learning resources to enable peer-to-peer learning
- Reducing dependencies of learners on training activities conducted by advanced researchers
- Contributing to the community engagement and sustainability of smaller life science communities
Online Presence
Follow me on Twitter @malvikasharan
Check out contributions by and mentions of Malvika Sharan on www.software.ac.uk
