Fact file
- Before moving to the UK, Malvika worked at European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Heidelberg as a community coordinator for the Bio-IT project.
- After receiving her Masters from University of Bonn she conducted her PhD research in bioinformatics at the University of Würzburg.
- She is a co-founder of the Open Life Science training and mentoring project and a fellow of Software Sustainability Institute.
Update: This interview took place in 2020. Malvika Sharan is now a Tools Practices and Systems (TPS) Senior Researcher and a co-lead of The Turing Way.
Tell us about your work at the Turing?
I am the community manager of The Turing Way, an open-source book project that involves and supports diverse stakeholders in research to make reproducible, ethical and inclusive data science beneficial for the wider community.
What aspect of your work is most exciting for you right now?
The most exciting part of my work is the collaborative nature of The Turing Way. As a community-driven project, The Turing Way has involved over 150 contributors, so far, in developing more than 20 chapters on tools, recommendations and best practices in reproducible research. This has been read and shared by hundreds of people globally. I have been fortunate to work closely with many of these contributors who share a common goal of creating a welcoming platform that is open and inclusive by design.
I would also like to highlight the Open Life Science project which I co-founded. We train and mentor early-career researchers in learning and applying open research practices to their work to help them become ambassadors of open-science in their communities. We are currently recruiting mentees and mentors from within the Turing and I am excited to connect with people who are interested in joining us.
What do you anticipate will be the impact of your work?
We hope to positively impact the research culture of our community. The Turing Way not only advocates for reproducible research but also aims to build a community infrastructure that is accessible for participants who want to help each other to advance their own research skills. Kirstie Whitaker, the lead of this project, has been extremely influential to me as a supervisor and mentor who is always open to discuss system-level practices that we can adapt in our community that will impact our research culture positively.
What three words would you use to describe your work?
Community-building, digital-inclusion, openness.
Finally, when not working what can you be found doing?
When not working, you can find me reading books and binge-watching documentaries on intersectionality, history, social issues, and food. Most weekends I attempt to recreate my grandma’s and mom’s recipes of dishes I grew up eating in India - this month’s theme is “mango”!