We designed the rOpenSci Champions Program with a mentorship aspect. Mentoring plays a significant role in the growth and development of both mentors and mentees alike. In our program, each Champion has a mentor who accompanies them during their training and development of their project.

In this series of blog posts, we introduce you to the ten teams of this first cohort and what they will be working on in the program.

Meet Bilikisu Wunmi Olatunji from Nigeria and Christina Maimone from United States!

Bilikisu Wunmi Olatunji – Champion

I’m a Data Scientist and RShiny Developer from Nigeria based in the country’s capital city, Abuja. I’m a certified RStudio Instructor for Tidyverse and R Shiny and have a Master’s of Science from the University of Liverpool, UK.

I’m also the founder and co-organizer of Abuja R Users Group and R-Ladies Abuja. My interest is in geospatial data science, and I have been working on several related projects using R.

I’ll be working on a package to ease the use of geospatial data for Microplanning in public health. I’ll also be volunteering on other projects to strengthen the R open science community.

Christina Maimone – Mentor

I am the associate director of research data services for Northwestern University’s Research Computing Services team (Chicago, USA). Our team provides data science, data visualization, software development, and data management support and training for researchers at the university. I also teach data visualization in the MS in Health Analytics program at Northwestern. I’m a founding member of the US Research Software Engineer (US-RSE) Association steering committee, and I’m active in the research computing and data community with organizations including CaRCC.

I’ve been using and teaching R for over 20 years. My background is in computational social science. I have a PhD in political science and MS in statistics from Stanford University.

I’ve been a reviewer for JOSS, but not for any rOpenSci packages yet, so the Champions program is a way for me to help contribute to the community. Building and maintaining communities is hard, so I’m happy to support efforts that encourage more people to actively engage and become new leaders. I hope to see more R developers active in the research software engineering community as well.

We’re excited to have both Bilikisu and Christina as part of the Champions program and can’t wait to see what this partnership yields. Stay-tuned for the next series of introductions 😉 .