JeffreySpies, Ph.D.

221B is the second business I've started. In 2013, together with Brian Nosek, I founded COS. During my tenure, COS grew to 56 full-time staff, not including interns and raised more than $37M in funding from a variety of sources. COS's flagship product, the Open Science Framework (OSF), was my dissertation project.

As the CTO at COS, I was responsible for technical strategy, product vision, software architecture, external partner/funder development, and management of COS Labs—COS's research and development team.

In practice, I have always focused more on developing methods and tools in order to help others do their science efficiently than doing science myself. However, over the course of my graduate studies, my substantive research was focused on autism, non-verbal communication, and motor control. My methodological, statistical, and computational interests have included agent-based modeling, evolutionary computation, information visualization, time-series analysis, and dynamical systems analysis.

OK, not technically, but I co-led the SHARE project, a partnership between COS and the Association of Research Libraries, and spend a lot of time with real librarians. I like to think that I can talk digital archival, preservation, and metadata with the best of them. I believe the library is key to improving scholarship and should play a central role on campuses, especially with regard to increasing innovation and diversity.

Open source, open science, open scholarship, open data, open workflow—open solves many of the challenges currently recognized in the sciences and scholarship more broadly and, more than that, makes research more efficient, of higher quality, and more accessible and diverse.

I have taught both undergraduates and graduate courses centered around statistics and/or computing as well as a number of workshops. I also created and managed COS's internship program, which trained 129 technical interns over the course of 3 years—27 of whom we later hired as full-time staff. The program is based upon a pedagogy I developed while teaching at Notre Dame that focuses on learning how to learn in order to achieve increased learning efficiency and self-confidence through self-sufficiency. It includes techniques to attract and retain minorities in STEM (e.g., real-world projects, service-learning setting, particular attention paid to acknowledging imposter syndrome and positively interpreting frustration). COS has more work to do, but 35% of our interns have been women, and we've hired at that exact same rate. Engineering can and needs to be far more diverse than it is.