JeffreySpies, Ph.D.

Research Technologist and Methodologist


Location

Columbus, OH

Email

Intro

The basics.

By education, I am a computer scientist, statistician, and psychologist. In practice, I am a research technologist and methodologist with a focus on workflow, incentives, and biases. I am currently most motivated by increasing research efficiency. That includes increasing research quality, accessibilty, and diversity.

I am the founder of 221B LLC, a strategic consulting firm combining expertise in research technology, methodology, and workflow to accelerate projects across higher-education. Additionally, my team and I are exploring new technical frameworks to increase data sharing, reuse, and, ultimately, research efficiency. I maintain a leadership role in the community project, SHARE--an initiative founded by the Association of Research Libraries to create a free, open knowledge graph of scholarly research activity across the research life cycle.

Prior to forming 221B, I co-founded and served as the Chief Technology Officer of the Center for Open Science (COS), a non-profit technology company missioned to increase openness, integrity, and reproducibility of scholarly research. As CTO, I was responsible for technical and product strategy, software architecture, external partner and funder development, and management of COS's research and development team.

I completed my undergraduate work at the University of Notre Dame, where I also earned my Masters while in a joint program in Psychology and Computer Science. I went on to receive my Ph.D. in Quantitative Psychology from the University of Virginia. My dissertation included the development of the Open Science Framework (OSF)--a free, open-source platform for managing and sharing research and the flagship product of COS. The OSF was expanded to power other services including OSF Preprints and community servers including SocArXiv, LawArXiv, and EarthArXiv. I am regularly invited to speak on topics of openness, reproducibility, workflow, and the role of technology in scholarship. In March of 2017, I testified on these topics at a United States House congressional hearing.

Hats

I wear a few.
01

Entrepreneur

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.

02

Technologist

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.

03

Researcher, Scientist, Statistician

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.

04

Librarian

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.

05

Openness Advocate

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.

06

Educator

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.

Education

Computer Science.
Psychology.
Statistics.
2013

Ph.D. Quantitative Psychology

University of Virginia

2007

M.A. Quantitative Psychology (joint Computer Science)

University of Notre Dame

2004

B.S. Computer Science, Second Major: Psychology

University of Notre Dame

Experience

2018 – Present

221B

Principal

2013 – 2018

Center for Open Science

Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer

2014 – 2018

SHARE

Co-director

2016 – 2018

University of Virginia

Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Engineering and Society

2015 – 2016

University of Virginia

Visiting Scholar, Department of Engineering and Society

2010 – 2013

University of Virginia

Statistical Computing Instructor and Consultant

2008 – 2009

University of Virginia

National Institute of Aging Training Fellow

2008

University of Virginia

Laboratory Manager, Human Dynamics Laboratory

2006 – 2007

University of Notre Dame

Laboratory Manager, Laboratory for the Quantitative Investigation of Human Dynamics

2004 – 2007

University of Notre Dame

Departmental Graduate Fellow