Welcoming speakers & mentors of Science Hack Day Vilnius 2018

We’re very excited to have some awesome DIY science & open science practitioners and advocates coming to Science Hack Day Vilnius 2018, all doing amazing work and research. Each speaker will present ~10 minute talk on their work & ideas on open science. They will also be mentoring hackathon participants throughout the weekend, so grab them if you think they can help you with your project idea!

First of all, we will have Lucy Patterson – one of the organizers of Science Hack Day Berlin, who gave us the idea to organize our own Science Hack Day in the first place! Lucy is a freelance science hacker, community organiser, an active advocate for DIY science: the practice or application of science outside of an institutional context, typically for civic or cultural purposes. She is part of the Berlin collective space and community, Lacuna Lab, focussed on hybrid art practices involving science and technology, and usually works as a freelance event organiser and community manager. She lives in Berlin but is originally from the UK, and has a background in molecular biology.

Yo Yehudi is joining us from Cambridge. Yo runs Code is Science, a project working to promote the importance of open source code in science. She’s also a 2018 Software Sustainability Institute Fellow, a recent Mozilla Open Leadership program graduate, and by day she works as a software engineer on the open source project InterMine, based at the Department of Genetics at the University of Cambridge. Yo was “recruited” for Science Hack Day Vilnius during the last Mozilla festival, MozFest2017 ?

Margaret Gold is also joining us from the UK. Margaret is a mobile industry veteran now applying mobile and web technologies to participatory science at the Natural History Museum in London. For more than 15 years she has worked with entrepreneurs and inventors to launch new businesses to market, has helped corporates to expand their offerings with innovative new products and services, and has run creative collaboration events (such as Hack Days and ThinkCamps) that apply technologies in new fields.

Eglė Marija Ramanauskaitė – one of the organizers of Science Hack Day Vilnius, is a science communicator, educator and researcher at the intersection of life and social sciences. She is Citizen Science Coordinator at the Human Computation Institute. Trained as a molecular biologist and education scientist, her interests include open science, grassroots and DIY science and the hacker movement.

We are pleased to welcome Dr. Saulius Gražulis – a professor at the Joint Life Sciences Center, Vilnius University, and a fellow hacker. Saulius studied biophysics in the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. He then completed his PhD thesis at the Munich technical university in the field of protein X-ray crystallography. He is now actively developing the Crystallography Open Database (COD, http://crystallography.net) and other resources related to it, as well as advocating for the importance of knowledge sharing and open science.

Dr. Sergejus Orlovas from FTMC will be a mentor for participants of M-LAB photonics challenge.

Last but not least, members of Kaunas Makerspace, Technarium and M-LAB will be here to help as well!