We designed the rOpenSci Champions Program with a mentorship aspect. Mentoring plays a significant role in the growth and development of both mentors and mentees alike. In our program, each Champion has a mentor who accompanies them during their training and development of their project.

In this series of blog posts, we introduce you to the ten teams of this first cohort and what they will be working on in the program.

And last, but not least, meet Ghozayel Elotteebi from Saudi Arabia and Zebulun Arendsee from United States!

Ghozayel Elotteebi – Champion

Hi, I’m Ghozayel Elotteebi, an Open Science Community Saudi Arabia (OSCSA) member with an MA in applied linguistics. I’m based in the UK, completing my PhD at the University of Nottingham.

I’ve developed a new package called Lextale. To my knowledge, this is the first R package in the field of linguistics developed in Saudi Arabia and would be the first local contribution to rOpenSci. I would love to create a community of contributors around the packages and promote advocacy for a culture of data sharing and reusable software, especially from Middle East/North Africa regions. Being part of rOpenSci is an opportunity for networking with other champions/mentors from around the world, a potential to support the community, share experiences, and contribute to the existing body of reproducible science.

Zebulun Arendsee – Mentor

Hi! I’m Zebulun Arendsee (Zeb) and hope to serve as a mentor in R package development.

I am a bioinformatics scientist at Regeneron working on sequencing, annotation, and oligonucleotide therapeutics design. In the past, I studied influenza at the USDA as a postdoc and orphan genes at Iowa State University as a graduate student. I’ve published many packages in R, including a few on CRAN and rOpenSci. I also develop in Python where I maintain several packages on PyPI and Conda and have one accepted JOSS paper. Outside my scientific work, I write mostly in Haskell, where I am building the Morloc programming language.

So that’s me in a nutshell, I’m really excited about the Champion Program and am looking forward to helping where I can!

We’re excited to have both Ghozayel and Zebulun be part of the Champions program and look forward to enjoying the outcomes of their project.

This is the last introduction and we hope you’ve enjoyed meeting our 2022/2023 Champions and Mentors!