Arfon Smith

Arfon Smith is a Staff Product Manager for Data at GitHub, supporting the work of their data science and data engineering teams, and helping bring open source to academia by improving support for scholarly work on the platform. Previously, he founded and led the Data Science Mission Office at [STScI](https://stsci.edu) in Baltimore – the home of Hubble Space Telescope and other flagship NASA science missions.

A lapsed academic with a passion for new models of scientific collaboration, he's used big telescopes to study dust in space, built sequencing platforms in [Cambridge](https://sanger.ac.uk) and has engaged millions of people in online citizen science by co-founding the [Zooniverse](https://zooniverse.org).

Arfon is passionate about the mission of the Software Sustainability Institute, and improving the career prospects of academics and other researchers who invest time in creating  high-quality research software. His contributions in this space include founding the [Journal of Open Source Software](http://joss.theoj.org) (JOSS), a developer friendly, open access journal for research software packages, co-authoring the [Software Citation Principles](https://peerj.com/articles/cs-86/), and advocating for investments in community metadata standards such as [CodeMeta](https://codemeta.github.io) and [Citation File Format](https://citation-file-format.github.io).