About

Hello, I’m Arfon Smith

I’m a Director of Product Manager for Data at GitHub, supporting the work of our data science and data engineering teams. Previously, I founded and led the Data Science Mission Office at STScI in Baltimore – the home of Hubble Space Telescope and other flagship NASA science missions. For those of you paying attention, you might have noticed that I was at GitHub once before (2013–2016), helping to bring open source to academia.

A lapsed academic with a passion for new models of scientific collaboration, I’ve used big telescopes to study dust in space, built sequencing platforms in Cambridge and have engaged millions of people in online citizen science by co-founding the Zooniverse.

I’ve been known to publish the odd paper and have also accidentally built a couple of academic journals in my time too. The most recent of which is the Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS), a developer friendly, open access journal for research software packages.

Contact

If you need to contact me then say hi on Twitter, find me on GitHub, or send me an email.