CruzCon: Open Source for Research & Innovation | UCSC OSPO

Keynote: Kirstie Whitaker

Thu, 22 Oct 2026 15:00:00 -0700

Talk title and abstract coming soon.

Speaker

Kirstie Whitaker is Executive Director of the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS), where she supports open source software and infrastructure. She founded The Turing Way, a community-built guide to reproducible and ethical data science, maintains JupyterHub and Jupyter Book, and is a 2026 Jupyter Distinguished Contributor.

Panel: Campus Infrastructure Supporting Open Source and Impact

Thu, 22 Oct 2026 13:45:00 -0700

Sustainable open source that has impact outside the university requires infrastructure: specialized centers, dedicated staff, and institutional support that most research grant funding does not cover. For universities, creating this infrastructure is a direct investment in research impact and can produce widely adopted tools, high-profile collaborations, and follow-on funding, all of which strengthen a campus’s research standing and its ability to compete for major grants and partnerships. For external partners — including industry — healthy open source infrastructure on campus means direct access to emerging tools and talent, making it a high-leverage place to invest, partner, and recruit.

This panel brings together leaders from campus research centers and infrastructure programs to discuss what it takes to build and resource this kind of support, and what funders — from university administration to industry partners — stand to gain by getting behind it.

Speakers

James Davis (Moderator) is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at UC Santa Cruz and Faculty Director of the Center for Research in Open Source Software (CROSS). His research spans computer graphics, machine vision, and applying technology to global social issues.

Stephanie Lieggi is Executive Director of the Center for Research in Open Source Software (CROSS) and the UC Santa Cruz Open Source Program Office, and Chair of the UC OSPO Network. She previously worked in nonproliferation research at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies.

Jason Nielsen is a Professor of Physics at UC Santa Cruz and Director of the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics (SCIPP). An experimental particle physicist, he collaborates on the ATLAS experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider.

Benedict Paten is a Professor of Biomolecular Engineering at UC Santa Cruz and associate director of the UCSC Genomics Institute, where he directs the Computational Genomics Lab. He is a PI on genomics efforts including NHGRI AnVIL, the Human Cell Atlas, and the Human Pangenome Reference Consortium.

Jeffrey D. Weekley is Director of Research IT at UC Santa Cruz, leading HPC and research cyberinfrastructure for roughly 1,100 researchers, and brings over 30 years of HPC and networking experience. A PhD student in Computational Media at UCSC, he studies generative AI for neurodiverse STEM learners.

Keynote: Research Software Engineering and Research Software Engineers: Successes and Challenges

Thu, 22 Oct 2026 11:50:00 -0700

Speaker

Daniel S. Katz is Research Professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Chief Scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). Previously at NSF, JPL, and Cray Research, he co-founded the Journal of Open Source Software, US-RSE, and the Research Software Alliance.

Panel: Open Source Ecosystems as a Pathway to University Innovation

Thu, 22 Oct 2026 10:20:00 -0700

UCSC faculty discuss how open source ecosystems create pathways for university research to reach broader impact.

Speakers

Emily Lovell (Moderator) is Associate Director of the UC Santa Cruz Open Source Program Office. Her research and teaching invite broader participation in computing, focusing on newcomers to open source. She previously taught open source contribution at Berea College and holds a PhD from UC Santa Cruz.

Daniel Fremont is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at UC Santa Cruz, where he applies formal methods to make software, hardware, and cyber-physical systems more reliable. His open-source Scenic language is widely used in academia and industry to test and train autonomous systems.

Leilani Gilpin is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at UC Santa Cruz, where she leads the AI Explainability and Accountability Lab. Her research develops methods for autonomous systems to explain their behavior, supporting robust decision-making, debugging, and accountability. She holds a PhD from MIT.

Katia Obraczka is a Professor at UC Santa Cruz's Baskin School of Engineering and campus director of CITRIS and the Banatao Institute at UCSC. An IEEE Fellow, she is recognized for contributions to energy-efficient protocols and routing in wireless networks, and her research spans computer networks and distributed systems.

J. Xavier Prochaska is a Distinguished Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz. An observational astrophysicist, he studies gas within, around, and between distant galaxies. He co-leads development of PypeIt, an open-source, community-developed Python pipeline for reducing astronomical spectroscopic data.

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000