Hello, I’m Arfon

I’m a Senior Fellow at Schmidt Sciences working in the Science Systems team. My current interests are oriented around the following themes:

🚀 Research software and research software engineers and how investment in software and its engineers can accelerate discoveries across disciplines.

💫 Research data management infrastructure, and how robust data management infrastructure can maximize the scientific returns on investments and enabling new research communities.

⚡ AI as a science accelerator: AI, particularly generative models, is transforming research software development and scientific discovery, opening new opportunities for automation, participation, and innovation in research.

Prior to working at Schmidt Sciences, I was a Director of Product at GitHub, responsible for integrating AI into the core GitHub product experience.

I’m an experienced leader and strategist with deep expertise in product, data science, and engineering, with a particular focus on open source. I thrive on solving hard problems through strong partnerships between product, design, (data) science, and engineering—my superpower is fluency in all these domains. I’ve worked across organizations of various sizes, scales, and sectors. Most recently, I founded and led the Data Science Mission Office at STScI in Baltimore, home to the James Webb and Hubble Space Telescopes and other flagship NASA science missions.

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 co-founded the Zooniverse, engaging millions in online citizen science.

I’ve been known to publish the odd paper and have also built a couple of academic journals, including 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.