Research and Professional Experience
Open Life Science (OLS),
UK/Global
02-2023
– Present
Co-founder
and Co-Director
OLS is
a non-profit organisation dedicated to open science training and mentoring,
research capacity building and adoption of best practices in data science.
Our
flagship project, Open Seeds, is a globally recognised training and mentoring
programme that has engaged over 700 researchers worldwide who designed,
launched and supported over 375 open science projects.
The Alan Turing Institute,
London, UK
07-2021
– Present
Senior
Researcher – Open Research
Community Management
I
established and led the first team of Research Community Managers (RCMs) at the
Turing, the UK’s national institute for data science. Since 2021, the RCM team
has grown into a team of 10 and six associated members. RCMs are integral to
fostering communities of practice, establishing cross-project and cross-team
collaborations, and driving the adoption and implementation of data science
best practices.
Funded
under the Tools, Practices, and Systems research programme, established from
initial investment through the £38 million AI for Science and Government
investment, I was the second member of this team tasked with developing and
pioneering research community management approaches both at the institution and
through international collaborative initiatives.
I
developed practices, infrastructure, and resources and operationalised
community management at the institute by mentoring, training, and championing
the work of RCMs who, alongside Research Software Engineers, Research
Applications Managers, and Data Wranglers, contribute to high-performing data
science and AI projects.
02-2023
– Present
Project
Lead - The Turing Way
Practitioners Hub
I
established The Turing Way Practitioners Hub as a platform for cross-sector
collaboration, knowledge exchange, and strategic partnerships, spanning various
sectors and data science organisations, including small and medium-sized
enterprises (SMEs).
Funded under
BridgeAI, a £100 million investment by Innovate UK, I
piloted the cohort-based model for strategic engagement and cross-sector
knowledge sharing through partnerships with national organisations such as the
Office for National Statistics, Genomics England, and the British Antarctic
Survey.
In
2024, the second cohort involved 20 companies in health, energy, technical
consulting, and creative sectors to provide opportunities to collaborate with
industry experts and develop strategic roadmaps for adopting AI, guided by open source principles, open data practices, and ethical
frameworks.
07-2021
– Present
Co-lead
investigator - The Turing Way
I lead
The Turing Way, an open-source, community-led project focused on data science
best practices. Over the past five years, I have guided the development and
scaling of a handbook dedicated to open, reproducible, and ethical research
practices, alongside nurturing a global research community. Accessed by over
6,000 unique visitors per month, The Turing Way has been co-created by 500
international collaborators, who share research practices, guidance, and
recommendations through chapters across five guides and through community-based
collaboration. Their work has inspired high-profile projects and organisations
and is referenced in peer-reviewed articles, training materials and policy
documents. A recent publication describes the impact of The Turing Way.
04-2023
– 05-2024
Co-lead
Researcher - Professionalising
traditional and infrastructure research roles in data science
I lead
The Turing Way, an open-source, community-led project focused on data science
best practices. Over the past five years, I have guided the development and
scaling of a handbook dedicated to open, reproducible, and ethical research
practices, alongside nurturing a global research community. Accessed by over
6,000 unique visitors per month, The Turing Way has been co-created by 500
international collaborators, who share research practices, guidance, and
recommendations through chapters across five guides and through community-based
collaboration. Their work has inspired high-profile projects and organisations
and is referenced in peer-reviewed articles, training materials and policy
documents. A recent publication describes the impact of The Turing Way.
01-2020
– 06-2021
Postdoctoral
Research Associate - Community Manager
The
Turing Way, Tools, Practices and Systems and the AI for Science and Government
programme (EPSRC funded), The Alan Turing Institute, London, UK.
European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL),
Heidelberg, Germany
07-2016
– 01-2020
Computational
Biologist, EMBL Bio-IT Community Project
Community
and outreach coordinator for the Bio-IT project that convenes, supports and
fosters a community of researchers from six EMBL sites. My role was to lead
organisation-wide initiatives to facilitate knowledge exchange, skill-building
and networking around bioinformatics and open practices.
Deputy
Training Coordinator - German Network for Bioinformatics Infrastructure (de.NBI) | ELIXIR-Germany. I represented EMBL at the
national level in de.NBI/ELIXIR-Germany. As a deputy
training coordinator, I contributed to the development of ELIXIR’s training
platform at the EU level.
Academic
Background
05-2012
– 06-2016
Ph.D.
in Computational Biology
Institute
of Molecular Infection Biology, Graduate School of Life Science, University of
Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany.
Thesis title:
Bio-computational identification and characterisation of RNA-binding proteins
in bacteria. Published 10 articles and an Open Source
Python Package: https://github.com/malvikasharan/APRICOT
10-2009
– 02-2012
M.Sc.
in Life Science Informatics
Bonn-Aachen
International Center for Information Technology
(B-IT), University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany.
Research
carried out at the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Aging, Cologne.
07-2005
– 06-2008
B.Sc.
in Biotechnology
People’s
Education Society Institute of Applied Science, Bangalore University,
Bangalore, India.
Successful
Grants and Funding
Open
Life Science (OLS)
o $1
Million by Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Open Science grant to carry out community
research, training and Fiscal Hosting Capacity to support research projects in
Low-to-Middle-Income countries (2025-2026).
o $575,000 by Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Open Science
grant to carry out community research, develop open source software training
modules and strategic planning for project sustainability (2022-2024).
o £100,000
from the Wellcome Trust Open Research fund to deliver
three cohorts of training and mentoring and conduct impact assessment research
(June 2022 - July 2024).
o $1.2
million across two grants by NASA’s Transform to Open Science, partnering with
the delivery of Open Science 101 through cohort-based training and mentoring.
o £64,599
by the Turing’s Skills Policy Award under the EPSRC Ecosystem Leadership
Funding for researching Widening Participation in Data Science.
o $50,000
(approximately) in three grants from the Turing Online Training Grant, Code for
Science and Society 2021 and The EOSC-Life Training Grant 2020 to build
capacity in open science through training and mentoring in their areas of focus
(2021-2022).
The
Turing Way and Practitioners Hub
o £810,000
under the Ecosystem Leadership Award to build the Practitioners Hub (October
2022 - March 2026).
o £550,000
under the InnovateUK BridgeAI
to scale and sustain The Turing Way as well as to support the Practitioners Hub
(July 2023 - March 2026).
o £200,000
(approximately) for two proposals funded by EPSRC under the AI for Science and
Government programme to conduct UX research and improve UI in The Turing Way,
and design training materials for senior professionals in biomedical research
(partnership with the Francis Crick Institute) respectively.
o £64,000
by the Turing’s Skills Policy Award under the EPSRC Ecosystem Leadership
Funding to conduct research for Diversifying Data Science Roles. I led the
development of a white paper for RCM roles and supervised a senior member of
the RCM team to conduct multi-stakeholder research to develop evidence-led role
descriptors for national policymakers and research funders.
EMBL -
EMBO Grants
o 2 x EMBO
grants to organise international conferences on protein bioinformatics and
systems biology in Seefeld, Austria (2018) and IISC
Bangalore, India (2019).
o 2 x EMBO
grants to host practical courses in computational biology for
early-to-mid-career researchers, with world leading leading
protein researchers and bioinformaticians as speakers and trainers at Italian
National Research Council, Italy (2018) and NCBS Bangalore, India (2019).
Fellowships
and Recognitions
o Software
Sustainability Institute Fellow (2019-Present) to lead open source efforts for
exploring and developing training strategies effective for the low-income
research environment.
o Named in 100
Brilliant Women in AI Ethics™ 2024 list.
o Community Champions
Award - 2022 by JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee, UK)
o Tech
Community Leaders Award - 2020 by CogX.
o The Turing
Way, under my leadership, received recognition as a highly commended project in
the ‘practices’ category by the HiddenRef Awards
(2021), received the OpenUK award for creating
Community Belonging and was mentioned as ‘an extremely innovative example of
best practice’ by the Royal Society Athena Award (2022).
o Mozilla Open
Leaders (2019) fellowship for open source movement-building and mentorship on
project development, web literacy and digital inclusion. In Open Leaders X for
community leaders, scoped, co-designed and launched OLS as a community project.
o Open
Bioinformatics Foundation Fellowship (2019) to lead discussions and events
around policy and practices to enhance diversity in the Open Source and
bioinformatics communities.
o The
Carpentries Community Service Award (2018) for setting standards for CarpentryCon and community conferences as a chair of the
committee and leading training courses internationally.
o Recipient of
Scientific Python (SciPy) Computing Diversity scholarships (2017 and 2018).
Chair of SciPy mini-symposium on
biosciences/bioinformatics (2017-2021).
o Grants by
Fáilte Ireland & University College Dublin for computational events,
including the first Carpentries conference hosted in Ireland for computational
skills building (2018)
o Recipient of the
best scientific project award for my PhD research at the ‘Critical Assessment
of Functional Annotation’ Special Interest Group at ISMB-ECCB 2015 in Dublin.
Community
Involvement
o Data
Science Without Borders (DSWB) Open Science and Capacity Building Working Group
Chair as the OSPO Now - Open Source Lead (2024 – Present).
o NASA-TOPS (Transform
to Open Science) advisor as part of its inaugural community panellist
(2022-2023).
o Curriculum
developer and Subject Matter Expert for NASA’s Open Science 101 training
(2022).
o Open
Science Netherlands: Strengthening local and thematic DCCs Committee Member
(2024).
o Climate
Sensitive Infectious Diseases Network Advisory Committee Member (2024 –
Present).
o The
Carpentries instructor trainer, mentor, content curator & Code of Conduct
Committee (2015 – Present).
o Data Dryad
Code of Conduct Ombudsperson (2024-Present).
o Code for
Science & Society Event Fund Advisory Committee member (2022-2024) and
member of the Event Fund Selection Committee (2020-2022)
o Society of
Research Software Engineering Trustee (2022)
o MetaDocencia Advisory Committee Member (2021-2024)
o Led
community workshops for UNESCO's Global Call for Best Practices in Open Science
through The Turing Way and Open Life Science, and submitted the recommendations
as a primary author (2022)
o Open
Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) Board Member and chair of Event Fellowship
(2019-2022)
o Google Season
of Docs project host and lead mentor (2020-2023)
o Elected chair
of the EMBL Staff Association and a member of the Equality and Diversity
committee (2017-2019) – developed the Stonewall evaluation plan for diversity
and inclusion
o EMBL Open
Science and Open Access event series Chair (2017-2019)
o Organised and
facilitated over 50 coding and data-handling workshops teaching Python, command
line, version control, GitHub project design and literate programming
(2016-2020).
o Organiser and
instructor at Computing Skills for Reproducible Research training series
(2016-2020)
o Instructor for a
module on using APIs in Python at the Postgraduate Certificate course in Biocuration by the University of Cambridge and EMBL-EBI, Hinxton, UK (2019).
o Trainer at
‘train-the-trainer’ workshops in Argentina, Germany, Greece, India, South
Africa, Sweden, United Kingdom and online for teaching computation skills
(2018-2020).
o Organiser of
public events Technical Sessions with Bio-IT & de.NBier,
Heidelberg (2017-2018)
o Co-organiser
of Heidelberg Unseminars in Bioinformatics
(2016-2019)
o Co-founder
of Würzburg Unseminars in Bioinformatics and Systems
Biology (2015)
o Designed and
taught programming course for beginners at Open Source Software writing for
researchers by FOSTER, Helmholtz Centre Potsdam, Germany (2015).
o Speaker of the
Doctoral Researchers Council at The University of Würzburg, represented the
interests of ECRs at o FOSTER-UNESCO
Open Science for Doctoral Schools, France (2015)
Invited
and Selected Talks
o Invited panelist at the British Embassy Brussels hosted AI
Governance and Innovation: Views from Across the Channel (2024).
o Host of
"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
(2024).
o Keynote at the Open
Research Conference in Manchester (2024): “Open science for enabling
reproducible, ethical and collaborative research”. https://zenodo.org/records/11061745.
o Keynote at the
Software Funders Forum in Montreal (2023): “Exploring ‘Do No Harm’ Principles
in Open Research Communities”, https://zenodo.org/records/8361334.
o Keynote at the
EMBL-EBI course - Genome bioinformatics in Cambridge (2022): “Open Science
& Reproducibility: Ethically-led computational research”, https://zenodo.org/records/7428708.
o Keynote at the
Open Science fair (2021): “Can we reimagine FAIR for Open Science communities” https://zenodo.org/records/5518163.
o Plenary talk
at the inaugural Society for Open, Reliable, and Transparent Ecology and
Evolutionary Biology conference “The Turing Way Guide to Reproducible, Ethical
and Collaborative Research” (2021)
o Invited talk
at FOSS-Backstage “Building a culture of collaboration in open science
communities” (2021)
o Panellist at
Declaration of Research Assessment (DORA) event “Assessing Contributions to
Research reproducibility and Open Science” (EuroScience
Open Forum 2020, and DORA webinar 2021)
o Guest
Lecture and Demo at MIT Experiential Ethics Virtual Field Trip “The Turing Way
Guide to Ethical Research” (2020)
o Keynote
‘Inclusiveness in Open Science’ at OpenCon, Bern,
Switzerland (2018)
Chair
and organisers of international conferences
o Bioinformatics Open
Source Conference hosted by Open Bioinformatics Foundation (online - 2021)
o The impact
of the COVID-19 crisis on women in science at EMBL (online - 2020)
o 4 x
European Molecular Biology Organisation conferences and training events in
Europe and Asia (2018 & 2019)
o 3 x The
Carpentries conferences (Dublin - 2018, Manchester - 2019, and online - 2020)
Selected
Publications
A
complete list of 20+ publications can be found here: https://tinyurl.com/MalvikaSharanPublications.
o Sharan M.,
(2024), Aligning Open Science with “Do No Harm”. Chapter One: Research Report -
Do No Harm Guide: Global Perspectives on Equity in Research and Data Do
No Harm Guide: Global Perspectives on Equity in Research and Data, https://www.urban.org/research/publication/do-no-harm-guide-global-perspectives-equity
o Sharan, M., Karoune, E., Hellon, V., Gould
Van Praag, C., Kayumbi, G.,
Bennett, A., Araujo Alvarez, A., Lee Steele, A., Batchelor, S., Lacey, A.,
Whitaker, K. (2024), Professionalising Community Management Roles in
Interdisciplinary Research Projects. https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.00108
o 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
Computational Biology, 20(7), e1012232. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1012232
o Sonabend, R., Carnegie, A., Steele, A. L., Nugent, M., &
Sharan, M. (2024). Unicorns Do Not Exist: Employing and Appreciating Community
Managers in Open Source. ArXiv e-prints, 2407.00345.
Retrieved from https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.00345v1
o 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 Computational Biology, 20(3), e1011797. doi: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1011797
o 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 Computational Biology, 18(5), e1010015. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1010015
o Levitis, E.,
van Praag, C. D. G, .et al., (2021). Centring
inclusivity in the design of online conferences—An OHBM–Open Science
perspective. GigaScience, 10(8), giab051., https://doi.org/10.1093/gigascience/giab051
o Davey, N.
E., Babu, M. M., et al.,. (2019). An intrinsically disordered protein community
for ELIXIR. F1000Research, 8. https://doi.org/10.12688%2Ff1000research.20136.1
o Wibberg D, Batut B, Belmann P et al., (2019) The de.NBI
/ ELIXIR-DE training platform - Bioinformatics training in Germany and across
Europe within ELIXIR. F1000Research, 8 (ELIXIR):1877 https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.20244.1
o Sharan, M., Förstner, K. U., Eulalio, A.,
& Vogel, J. (2017). APRICOT: an integrated computational pipeline for the
sequence-based identification and characterization of RNA-binding proteins.
Nucleic Acids Research, 45(11), e96–e96. https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkx137
o Tawk, C., Sharan, M., Eulalio,
A. et al. (2017). A systematic analysis of the RNA-targeting potential of
secreted bacterial effector proteins. Sci Rep 7, 9328 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-09527-0
o Michaux, C., Holmqvist, E., Vasicek, E., Sharan, M., Barquist,
L., Westermann, A. J., Gunn, J. S., Vogel, J. (2017). RNA target profiles
direct the discovery of virulence functions for the cold-shock proteins CspC and CspE. Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences, 114(26), 6824–6829. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1620772114
o Sunkavalli, U., Aguilar, C., Silva, R. J., Sharan, M., Cruz, A.
R., Tawk, C., ...Eulalio,
A. (2017). Analysis of host microRNA function uncovers a role for miR-29b-2-5p
in Shigella capture by filopodia. PLOS Pathogens, 13(4), e1006327. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.ppat.1006327
o Jiang, Y.,
Oron, T., Clark, W. et al. An expanded evaluation of protein function
prediction methods shows an improvement in accuracy. Genome Biol
17, 184 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13059-016-1037-6
Narrative
CV to highlight Relevant Skills and Competencies
o Performed
strategic leadership and community management roles. Developed and implemented
strategies at an organisational and global scale for development, project
sustainability and community building in open science. (1) I lead The Turing
Way, a community-led guide to data science at The Alan Turing Institute. (2) I
am a co-founder and co-director of the Open Life Science training and mentoring
programme (non-profit organisation). In both projects, I take strategic roles
in scoping, development, management and decision-making at the organisational
levels, as well as conducting community research that applies equity,
diversity, inclusion and intersectionality approaches in community building and
leadership. These programmes have together engaged over 2000 international
researchers to collaborate, develop resources and integrate open practices in
their projects across different contexts.
o Established and
led a team of newly professionalised Research Community Management roles at The
Alan Turing Institute. Developed and implemented evidence-led practices on
community building, stakeholder collaboration and integration of data science
best practices. Co-conducted research on the professionalisation of RCM and
other novel data science roles through research projects funded by the Turing’s
Skills Policy Award for professionalising data science roles. Community
management practices are shared broadly through The Turing Way to build
examples for acknowledgement and recognition for contributors to open science
community-led resources. I also provide training and keynotes on themes
including community building, open science, reproducibility and supporting open source contributors, drawing from my research work.
o Founded a
forum of academic and industry collaboration through The Turing Way
Practitioners Hub that engages and involves industry experts, called Experts in
Residence (EiRs), from partnering organisations. Led
collaboration, training and consultation to support cross-sector collaboration,
knowledge exchange, and strategic partnerships, spanning various sectors and
data science initiatives, including but not limited to the small and
medium-sized enterprises (SME) in BridgeAI network.
In the second cohort with 20 organisations, this initiative will support the
improvement of AI adoption strategies for SMEs, enhancing the quality,
viability, and real-world impact of data science in their sectors.
o Conducted
interdisciplinary bioinformatics research as a PhD researcher and master's
student in Germany with published open access resources. A background in
computational biology with experience developing and maintaining Open Source Python Projects. I also wrote project reports,
technical documentation, scientific papers, learning resources, community
guides and blog posts, most of which are published under open licences.
o Contributed to the
EU-level efforts to develop and implement computational skills and capacity
building through high-profile collaborations, 1:1 consulting and technical
support at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (an intergovernmental
organisation) and ELIXIR Germany (Europe's leading life science organisations
for infrastructure and capacity building). I delivered training and outreach
programs and co-authored Open Source Software
recommendations for the ELIXIR training platform (2016-2020).
o Recognised as an
expert in community building and open research with several community awards
and recognitions. I take on advisory roles in Open Science infrastructure and
capacity-building projects through my participation in the NASA - TOPS
(Transform to Open Science) community panel, Society of Research Software
Engineering Trustee board, Code of Science and Society and MetaDocencia
Advisory committee.
o Participated in the
design, development and implementation of organisational governance and policy
as senior researcher at The Alan Turing Institute, the lead of The Turing Way,
the director of strategy and partnership in Open Life Science and the chair of
The Carpentries Code of Conduct Committee. Consulted and guided community
development and governance practices for several projects at the Turing and
more widely for open science communities such as NASA-TOPS, eLife
Innovation, Invest in Open Infrastructure, Humanitarian OpenStreetMap, The
Carpentries, Open Science Saudi Arabia, Bioinformatics Hub Kenya, RSE-India
Association, MetaDocencia, Code for Science and
Society, and more.
o Established
collaborations with multiple stakeholders at The Alan Turing Institute. I work
closely with the members of the Public Policy, Academic Engagement, National
Skills and Strategy team and Research Engineering Group in training and
capacity building projects, two of which are funded under the EPSRC’s £10m
awards. I led the development of Introduction to Data Science for Biomedical
Scientists, a Turing-Crick Partnership Project funded under the AI for Science
and Government programme. I am co-leading the AI and Data Science Educators
programme to build training capacity through evidence-based pedagogical
knowledge.
o Actively
promote and train researchers in Open Source, Open Access, Open Data, FAIR principles
and participatory research. I delivered six keynotes and plenary/invited talks
at international conferences at nearly 100 events. I organised and taught in
more than 50 training courses/workshops on a wide range of topics that help
scientists develop their skills to make their research open, reproducible and
digitally accessible.