The UT-OSPO is a cross-organizational unit led by experts from the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), central IT services, University of Texas Libraries, and the School of Information to form an umbrella organization that is more than the sum of its parts.
Core Team
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Dr. Jennifer Schopf
Primary Investigator
Director of Networking Partnerships at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC)
Dr. Jennifer Schopf has been part of the pragmatic open software use community for over 20 years. While a program officer at NSF, she actively promoted the use of open source licensing for NSF-funded software projects as part of the Data Management Policy Development Team, but she’s also been part of several software projects with strong international uptake, including the Globus Toolkit, the perfSONAR consortium, and the NetSage project.
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Dr. Angela Newell
Co-Primary Investigator and Director
Executive Director of Innovation for the Chief Information Office
Dr. Newell has been a part of the public and open data environment for nearly 15 years. She was part of the team that, jointly with the White House, developed data.gov, one of the largest open data systems in the world. Dr. Newell has also served as a campus liaison for IT for nearly a decade and is an active participant in the research community as the grant administrator for the Longhorn Innovation Fund for Technology and as a representative of the Chief Information Officer.
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Michael Shensky
Co-Primary Investigator
Head of Research Data Services for the UT Libraries
Michael has been a strong advocate for the use of open source GIS software over the past decade in his roles as a Geography Lecturer and then as a GIS and Geospatial Data Coordinator. He has significant experience teaching others in for-credit courses and in non-credit workshops offered to the campus community about the benefits of using and engaging with open source software for both instruction and research, and is a current member of the open source FloDisMod team.
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Dr. Alex Marden
OSPO staff member
GIS and Geospatial data Coordinator with the UT Libraries
Alex has utilized open software to facilitate international fieldwork and collaboration as a graduate student researcher. In addition to his research, he has taught numerous open source software-based courses and workshops at UT. As GIS and Geospatial Data Coordinator, he routinely works with members of the campus community to develop open source workflows for their research.
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Michelle McDermott
Executive Assistant
Executive Assistant to the VP of Technology and Chief Information Officer
Michelle provides support to the CIO, the directors of ITS and the Open-Source Program Office.
Strategic Advisory Committee
The committee also includes Dr. Jennifer Schopf, Dr. Angela Newell, Michael Shensky and Dr. Alex Marden.
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Erika M. Bsumek
Professor of History
Dr. Bsumek researches and writes about Native American and Environmental History and is the creator of the Radical Hope Syllabus Project and ClioVis: Digital Timeline, Network Mapping, and Presentation software used for teaching and research.
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Tanya E. Clement
Associate Professor of English and Director of the Initiative for Digital Humanities
Tanya's primary areas of research are textual studies, sound studies, and infrastructure studies as these concerns impact academic research, research libraries, and the creation of research tools and resources in the digital humanities.
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Jenifer Flaxbart
Assistant Director of Research Support and Digital Initiatives, UT Libraries
Jenifer leads a department within the UT Libraries Academic Engagement division comprised of two teams of subject liaison librarians, the Digital Scholarship team and the Research Data Services team.
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John Fonner, PhD
Director, Special Projects, Texas Advanced Computing Center
With a background in Life Sciences Computing and over 13 years of experience at TACC, John works to improve tools, infrastructure, and training for collaborative research computing.
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Megan Scarborough
Director of Foundation Relations, UT Austin Development
Bringing 25 years of UT Austin experience, Megan connects private philanthropy with people and projects across the university to advance our core purpose to transform lives for the benefit of society.
User Advisory Group
The group will be led by Dr. Alex Marden.
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Audrey C. Brumback, MD, PhD
Assistant Professor of Neurology and Pediatrics
Dr. Brumback is a pediatric neurologist and neuroscientist dedicated to helping people with neurodevelopmental disorders thrive.
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Sergey Fomel
Professor
Sergey Fomel is Wallace E. Pratt Professor of Geophysics at the Jackson School of Geosciences and the creator of "Madagascar," an open-source software project for geophysical data analysis.
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Liberty Hamilton
Associate Professor, Dept. of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences and Dept. of Neurology
Liberty’s lab studies how the brain processes speech and language, and she works on development of methods for visualization and analysis of intracranial EEG and scalp EEG.
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Timothy H. Keitt
Professor
Professor Keitt is an ecologist and computer scientists appointed in the Department of Integrative Biology.
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Alex Knox
Senior Software Engineer
Alex Knox is a member of the ITS Emerging Technologies and Architectures Team with a focus on cloud computing and Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning workflows.
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Franco Pestilli
Neuroscientist in the Dept. of Psychology and the Dept. of Neuroscience (by courtesy)
Dr. Pestilli is a Cognitive and Computational Neuroscientist working on brain networks and is an expert in data technologies, such as data standards, cloud computing and international data governance.
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Paul von Hippel
Professor and Associate Dean of Research in the LBJ School of Public Affairs
Paul has published 11 pieces of open-source software for statistical analysis and data science.