Malvika Sharan


A Computational Biologist, advancing open, community-based, and ethical
approaches to make data science and AI more inclusive and collaborative.
Born and raised in India (Namaskar!), based in London (Hello!).

About me


Co-Director - OLS (Open Life Science)

Malvika Sharan is the Co-Director of Open Life Science (OLS) Ltd., a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to building capacity and diversifying research leadership through open science.

In her previous role as a Senior Researcher, Malvika established and led the first Research Community Management (RCM) team at The Alan Turing Institute. Joining The Turing Way in 2019, she led the The Turing Way, scaling this community-driven data science initiative from a small group to a global community of thousands, and transitioning to a community-governed model in 2025.

Malvika continues to contribute to the open science and open source communities. She serves on the Steering Committee of The Turing Way and the Advisory Committee of CSID-Network. She has advised initiatives like NASA Open Science, the Society of RSE, and Data Science Without Borders. She holds a Software Sustainability Institute fellowship and was featured on the 2024 "100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics™" list.

A lifelong learner, Malvika conducts research focused on improving open research, community building, collaboration, governance models, and ethical data science and AI research practices.

Current Projects

Co-Director of OLS

Co-founded with Bérénice Batut and Yo Yehudi
2019 - Present

OLS (Open Life Science Ltd.) is a not-for profit organisation dedicated to capacity building and diversifying leadership in research worldwide. Our flgaship project is Open Seeds, a 16-week training and mentoring programme that has worked with over 700 people who have launched and supported over 375 projects worldwide while stewarding Open Science for their communities.
🎧 Listen to The ORION Open Science Podcast to learn about the origin of OLS.

The Turing Way

Steering Committee Member (previously a Project Lead)
2020 - Present

The Turing Way is an open source project on best practices, guidance and recommendations on data science. I involve and support its diverse community of researchers, educators, policymakers and other stakeholders who develop and promote resources on reproducible, ethical, collaborative and inclusive data science. I founded The Turing Way Practitioners Hub to work with industry professionals to advance and promote open and ethical practices for AI in their respective sectors.
🎧 Listen to Sustain podcast to learn more.

RCM Cooperative

Co-Founded with Cassandra Gould Van Praag and Emma Karoune
2025 - Present

We are building cooperative of Research Community Managers (RCMs) dedicated to creating equitable, resilient and collaborative research. We are working with and for communities to develop and refine their capacity for equitable, resiliant and collaborative research. Find more details on our website and join.

Data Science Without Borders

Open Source Lead, OSPO Now
2024 - Present

Data Science Without Borders (DSWB) is an international initiative, funded by the Wellcome Trust and led by the African Population and Health Research Center (APHRC). The overarching objectives of DSWB are: to strengthen data systems in Pathfinder countries, to create a sustainable environment for collaborative AI/ML platforms, and to create a user-friendly platform for AI and Machine Learning (AI/ML) tools. Until June 2025, I chaired the Open Science and Capacity Building Working Group, and currently I support the community to utilise, learn from and contribute to The Turing Way, building a shared understanding of open science and reproducibility in data science and AI among the DSWB community, and extend the impact of DSWB for African researchers.

Community Involvements

Fellow

Software Sustainability Institute
2019 - Present

Advisory Board Member

Climate Sensitive Infectious Diseases Network
2024 - Present

Code of Conduct Committee Member

The Carpentries
2018 - Present

Code of Conduct Ombudsperson

Data Dryad
2024 - Present

Review Panel Member and Co-Chair

Cancer Research UK - Research Data
Community Demonstration Project Awards
2025

Committee Member

Open Science NL: Strenthening
Digial Competence Centers
2024
  

Community Panelist

NASA - Transform to Open Science
2022 - 2023

Trustee

Society of Research Software Engineering
2022

Grant Proposals Reviewer

Essential Open Source Software
for Science (EOSS)
2023-2024

Review and Selection Committee

CS&S Event Fund
2020 - 2024

Advisory Team

MetaDocencia
2021 - 2023

Board Member

Open Bioinformatics Foundation
2019 - 2022

Selected Work

Research, Articles and Reports

Sharan, M., Karoune, E., Hellon, V., van Praag, C. G., et. al. (2024). Professionalising Community Management Roles in Interdisciplinary Research Projects. arXiv, 2409.00108. Research Article/Position Paper

Sharan, M. (2024). Global Perspectives on Equity in Research and Data. Do No Harm Project - Urban Institute Research Report. Chapter 1 - Aligning Open Science with “Do No Harm” (Watch presentation recording from FOSDEM)

Karoune, E., and Sharan, M. (2024). Skills Policy Research Project: Diversifying and Professionalising Data Science Roles. Funded by the Turing's Skills Policy Award. Read Policy Briefing and explore other outputs (Watch a related talk from State of OpenCon 2022)

Stoudt, S., Jernite, Y., Marshall, B., Marwick, B., Sharan, M., Whitaker, K., & Danchev, V. (2024). Ten simple rules for building and maintaining a responsible data science workflow. PLoS Comput. Biol., 20(7), e1012232. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1012232

Hall, S. M., Kochin, D., Carne, C., Herterich, P., Lewers, K. L., Abdelhack, M., ...Sharan, M. (2024). Ten simple rules for pushing boundaries of inclusion at academic events. PLoS Comput. Biol., 20(3), e1011797. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1011797

Treasure, A. M., Hall, S. M., Lesko, I., Moore, D., Sharan, M., van Zaanen, M., ...van der Walt, A. (2022). Ten simple rules for establishing a mentorship programme. PLoS Comput. Biol., 18(5), e1010015. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1010015

You can visit my for other research articles.

Keynotes, Talks, Lecture

The Myth of Artificial - Spotlighting Community Intelligence for Responsible Science. Keynote at SciPy - 2025, Tacoma - Washington, DOI:10.5281/zenodo.15851500

Shaping Research (culture) Through Communities Lessons from Open Science. Keynote at STEP-UP RSLondon Conference - 2025, London - UK, DOI:10.5281/zenodo.15825321

Community-Driven Development and Adoption of Data Science and AI. Keynote at Summer School by ML-Labs - 2025, Dublin - Ireland, DOI:10.5281/zenodo.15629115

Open science for reproducible and ethical data science and AI. Keynote at SciLifeLab's annual conference - 2024, Stockholm - Sweden, DOI:10.5281/zenodo.14129343

Building Communities: Lessons from working in Open Science. Keynote at BioNT-CarpentryConnect - 2024, Heidelberg - Germany, DOI:10.5281/zenodo.14091819

Open science and digital commons for enabling reproducible, ethical and collaborative research, Keynotes and lectures at multiple events (2022-2024), DOI:10.5281/zenodo.7716932

Contributors, authors, and their acknowledgements (in research). Lecture at LMU-MPG Open Science Summer School - 2024, Munich/Online, DOI:10.5281/zenodo.15867348

Stakeholder Management in AI: Preparing for stakeholder engagement strategy. Technical Workshop for The Turing Way Practitioners Hub 2024-25 cohort, The Alan Turing Institute, UK. DOI:10.5281/zenodo.15090106

Exploring 'Do No Harm' Principles in Open Research Communities. Keynote at 2nd Funders Workshop - 2023, Montreal - Canada. DOI:10.5281/zenodo.8361334

Open Science & Reproducibility: Ethically-led computational research. Keynote Genome Bioinformatic by EMBL-EBI - 2022, Hinxton/OnlineDOI:10.5281/zenodo.7428708

Inclusiveness in Open Science Communities. Keynote at OpenCon 2018, Lausanne - Switzerland, DOI:10.5281/zenodo.4051476


Other Resources


The Turing Way Practitioners Hub Case Study Series for two Cohorts between 2022 - 2025.

I regularly publish open science, research and communication materials from my work openly -

I have been featured on a few podcasts over the years -

Recognition and Awards

Other Engagements

  • Invited panelist at the British Embassy Brussels hosted AI Governance and Innovation: Views from Across the Channel (2024).
  • Attended the United Nation's OSPOs for Good event at UN HQ in New York and hosted "Open Source Ecosystem Enabler - Digital Public Goods for Impact" panel as part of “What comes next in OSS”, a follow up to the UN OSPOs for Good organised at the Microsoft Office in New York (2024).
  • Contributed to the Open Science panel hosted by EMBL's Science and Society Conference 'In science we trust?' at EMBL Heidelberg, Germany (2025)
  • Atended and contributed to the Open Source Policy Summits hosted by Open Forum Europe in Brussles(2024, 2025).
  • Invited participant to the annual Sotware Heritage Symposium and Summit at UNESCO in Paris (2024, 2025).
  • Contributed to the roundtable workshop and attended the launch event for the Science in the age of AI report by The Royal Society in London (2024).
  • Attended and contributed to the launching symposium of Data Science Without Borders at Africa-CDC in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (2024).
  • Invited to participate in discussions hosted by OSTP on Open Science with the NASA Transform to Open Science Panel and leaders from CDC, EPA, NIH, NOAA, NSF and elsewhere at the White House (EEOB) in Washington DC, USA (2023).
  • Nominated and recieved an OpenUK award on behalf of The Turing Way Community at the OpenUK 2022 Annual Award Ceremony at House of Lords, London, UK (2022).

Press/Media Mentions

  • Müller, T., & Hiltemann, S. (2024). The Galaxy Training Network joined the BioNT Community Event & CarpentryConnect - Heidelberg 2024. GTN Website
  • Samuels, M. (2024). Why the ‘Do No Harm’ principle can be key to open source sustainability and equality. diginomica.
  • Hartley, K., Barker, M. (2023). Investing in people: anticipating the future of research software. Netherlands eScience Center - Medium.
  • Carter, L., The Human Rights Case for Open Science. (2022) Open Heroines. Originally published by LSE
  • Kupec, I. (2021). Coding between the vines, EMBL.
  • Tirok, K. (2019). New Carpentries Instructors at UKZN to Run Data and Computing Skills Workshops. UKZN NdabaOnline.
  • Kuo, M. (2018). Building community as a career. American Association for the Advancement of Science.

I have written blog posts on Open Science practices, community building, inclusiveness in research and related topics. Since they are dispersed across different community platforms, I try to compile and post them on my blog page whenever I can.

Get in touch

If you’d like to get in touch about projects for collaboration, speaking requests, mentorship or just to say 'Namaskar/Hallo/Hi!' - feel free to get in touch through any of the social channels linked below.