BIDS Steering Group election 2021

We are excited to announce the results of the BIDS Steering Group election.

The election was fierce this year with many excellent candidates!

After counting the votes the winner is ….. Ariel Rokem! We are excited to have Ariel join the BIDS Steering Group.

A little bit about what Ariel is bringing to the Steering Group:

I am a research faculty member at the University of Washington Department of Psychology and a data scientist at the University of Washington eScience Institute and lead the Neuroinformatics R&D Group. For more than a decade, I have been a contributor to community-maintained scientific open-source software and data sharing efforts, including minor contributions to the original formulation of BIDS – primarily on the inclusion of diffusion MRI, the data modality in which I do much of my work. BIDS faces interesting challenges as the standard expands into new types of experimental data and as use of the standard makes its way into more and more scientific applications. It is an exciting period to be part of the BIDS community, but also a period of challenges. In coming years, the Steering Group will have to deal with issues of sustainability and with the challenge of maintaining cohesion across the variety of BIDS development efforts. I hope to contribute from my experience and skills to these efforts. My experience in open-source development and open science communities has allowed me to observe some of the socio-technical patterns that promote thriving, inclusive communities, and I hope to be able to bring some of these observations into the work of the BIDS steering group. In recent years, I have devoted significant effort to training in and dissemination of best practices in scientific computing, including use of BIDS. I believe that there is still much work to be done to make BIDS more accessible to researchers and stake-holders at a variety of positions and inclinations, and I hope that my work within the Steering Group can help promote a more accessible, more inclusive BIDS.

Thank you again to the fantastic BIDS community for a successful Steering Group election!