Eleven Latin American Voices for Open Science: The New Cohort of Champions rOpenSci 2026

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We are very happy to introduce the new rOpenSci Champions. This group will experience the program and work in Spanish, allowing us to continue to strengthen the open science and research software development community in this language. We are excited about the projects they will develop, which address real challenges from different disciplines and territories in Latin America.

We invite you to meet each of these people and the projects they will be working on throughout the program.

Bastián Olea Herrera

My name is Bastián, I live in Chile, I am a sociologist by training and I have a Master’s degree in sociology. I like to create content and tutorials about R, and recently we are organizing a community of R users in Santiago, where I live. I am dedicated to data analysis in the public sector, where I work mainly with social data at different territorial levels. This kind of data always needs the same types of cleaning and corrections, but at the same time they usually vary a lot in small details between each source. That is why I applied to the program to develop a package that facilitates working with data at the communal and regional level in Chile. I hope to meet other R users and learn together, as well as receive support from people with more experience and knowledge, so that we can create useful tools for many people!

Denisse Fierro Arcos

My name is Denisse Fierro Arcos, I am a marine scientist originally from Ecuador but currently living in Australia. At the moment I am close to finishing my PhD program which focuses on developing best practices for the use of oceanographic models in marine ecosystem studies. I am also currently working as a researcher at the University of Tasmania where I am developing a marine ecosystem model that will allow us to project the possible impacts of climate change on marine species and fisheries. It is precisely this model that is the focus of my project with the Champions Program. We want to publish a package in R that will allow other marine researchers to easily run our model.

Durga Valentina Linares Herrera

Hello! My name is Durga Valentina Linares Herrera and I live in Lima, Peru. I am a social scientist, with a degree in Political Science from the Universidad Antonio Ruiz de Montoya and a diploma in Data Science for Social Sciences and Public Management from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. I work as a research assistant at the Research Center of the Universidad del Pacífico, where I explore the intersection between technology and work from a sociological perspective and with mixed methodologies. My current projects revolve around the Peruvian labor market and its exposure to artificial intelligence, and the evolution of the strike as a social phenomenon in Peru in the last three decades.

For the program I presented as a project {epen}, an R package to download, process, and analyze microdata from the Permanent National Employment Survey and its predecessor, the Lima EPE. This idea was born from my experience working directly with these databases. I could see how difficult it can be to access public labor data in a fast, clear, and reproducible way, especially for those of us who come from the social sciences and do not always come to these tools with a previous technical background, as was also my case. With this package, I seek to facilitate that path for researchers, students, and public sector analysts who need to build reliable labor indicators without having to start from scratch each time, something I find especially relevant in this time of so many changes.

In recent years, with the intention of developing new skills in a context where technology is quickly advancing, I moved towards a more quantitative approach and learned to program in a self-taught way with free resources on the internet. That process has been important for my professional development, but it also made me want to turn that learning into something useful for other people: a tool to help reduce the entry barriers that I myself encountered when I started. That’s how the motivation behind this package came about, and this Champions Program appeared just at the right time. I am excited to participate in an initiative like this and to be part of a network like rOpenSci, whose commitment to a more diverse and inclusive open science seems very valuable to me. I hope that this experience will allow me to consolidate in community a path that I once started on my own and pave the way for future packages aimed at improving access to Peruvian public data in R.

Evelia Lorena Coss Navarrete

I am a postdoctoral researcher specialized in transcriptomics and single cell data analysis. My research focuses on the study of transcriptomic profiles of Mexican patients with lupus, with the aim of better understanding the biological mechanisms of the disease and providing reproducible bioinformatics tools that strengthen both biomedical research and academic training in Mexico and Latin America.

I am a Biotechnology Engineer from the Polytechnic University of Sinaloa (UPSIN), originally from Mazatlan, and I did my Master’s and PhD in Plant Biotechnology at Cinvestav, where I studied the conservation of lncRNAs in plants.

My participation in the rOpenSci Champions Program seeks to strengthen communities such as VieRnes de Bioinformatics, R-Ladies Morelia and RSG-Mexico, promoting the creation of R packages with international standards, reproducible documentation and open review. My vision is to bridge the gap between the global rOpenSci community and local initiatives in Latin America, promoting a more open, inclusive and sustainable science.

Gladys Choque Ulloa

Hello! My name is Gladys Choque Ulloa, I am originally from Peru and currently reside in Brazil. I have a degree in Statistics, a Master’s in Statistics, and I am currently pursuing my PhD in Computer Science at the ICMC-USP of the University of São Paulo, Brazil. There, I am developing research in computational neuroscience focused on the automatic diagnosis of mental disorders, using Machine Learning models, Neural Networks, LLMs, Causal Inference, and Time Series. In addition to my academic work, I am founder of the organization Women in DataLab, where I work to reduce the gender gap in technology and data science.

I applied to the rOpenSci Champions Program because I strongly believe in the power of open science and reproducible software to democratize knowledge. During the program, my goal is to hone my skills in developing R tools and scientific software under global standards. With this experience I want to strengthen my technical profile and act as a bridge for more researchers in Latin America to adopt collaborative and open practices, enhancing the impact of our scientific community internationally.

José Daniel Conejeros Pavez

I am José Daniel Conejeros, MSc in Statistics from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. I am originally from Chile and currently develop my work between Chile and Italy. In Italy I work as a Lagrange Fellow at the ISI Foundation and as a young researcher at the SENTINET Center (Surveillance, epidemiology and new technologies for emerging infectious threats), working on issues of data science, complex systems, and public health.

My work is situated at the intersection of statistics, epidemiology, and computational social science to understand infectious disease dynamics and health outcomes for different populations. Currently, I am developing spatmask, an R package oriented to the masking and anonymization of spatial data (geomasking), with the goal of enabling reproducible analyses without compromising the privacy of individuals. This project aims to bridge the gap between the use of sensitive data for research and the ethical and regulatory restrictions that limit its access and use.

I decided to apply to the Champions Program because many of the challenges I face are not only technical, but also organizational and cultural. I want to understand how to develop scientific software collaboratively, how to document it correctly and how to foster reproducible practices in contexts where open science is not yet fully installed. I am interested in learning how to build tools that not only work, but that are understandable, auditable, and useful for research teams and Public Policy decision makers.

Through this program, I hope to strengthen my skills in scientific software development, open review and collaborative work. My goal is to translate this learning into concrete transfer: training, collaboration, and community building around open science in the region.

Linda Cabrera Orellana

Hello! My name is Linda, I am Ecuadorian and currently reside in Granada, Spain. I work as a Senior Data Analyst in a digital marketing agency and I share my experience as a teacher in business schools, where I teach classes on AI applied to analytics and data visualization.

My project consists of developing an R package with an educational approach to detect, explain, and help correct common structural errors in manually created datasets, specially designed for people with no technical background in data. I am applying to the program because I want to turn my practical and teaching experience into a real contribution to the open scientific software ecosystem, and to strengthen my skills in R package design, documentation, and maintenance.

I also hope that the project will serve as an educational resource in universities in Ecuador and in the R-Ladies community, and that it will build a bridge between those who collect data and those who analyze it, promoting data literacy in Spanish.

María Florencia Tames

My name is María Florencia Tames, I am a professor at the National University of Córdoba (Argentina) and I work in research in the area of air quality, exposure to air pollutants and environmental inequalities in urban contexts in Latin America.

With a team I developed the AirExposure R package, a tool for estimating daily exposure to air pollutants by integrating information on ambient concentrations, mobility, and daily routines. Through the rOpenSci Champions Program, my goal is to improve and consolidate this package as an open, reproducible and accessible tool for the community.

I am especially interested in strengthening my skills in open software development, incorporating best practices such as documentation, testing, and peer review, and learning to build tools that can be used beyond their original research context.

I am also motivated by the program’s focus on community and working in Spanish, as access to programming resources and training is often limited by language. I hope to be able to share what I have learned through training activities and contribute to the development of an open scientific software community in Latin America.

Marina Cecilia Cock

I am from Santa Rosa, La Pampa, Argentina. I have a degree in Natural Resources and Environment Engineering from the National University of La Pampa (UNLPam) and a PhD in Agrarian Sciences with orientation in Ecology from the University of Buenos Aires (UBA).

I am currently working as a research assistant at the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET) and as a teaching assistant in Biogeography and Statistics at the National University of La Pampa.

I applied to the program to learn about the R package review process. I am interested in participating because I find it especially valuable to join a community where learning is shared and collaborative. I am looking to strengthen my knowledge in R and then be able to transmit it both in my teaching role and within the R community.

Patricia Andrea Loto

I have a degree in Information Systems and a Diploma in Data Science, Machine Learning and its Applications. I am currently pursuing a Master’s Degree in Information Technology at the Universidad Nacional del Nordeste. I live and work in Argentina.

I work as a software developer and data analyst in the public sector, and as a university teacher in the area of systems and programming. I am a co-founder of RSE Argentina, member of the organizing committee of LatinR, and co-organizer of R-Ladies Resistencia-Corrientes. From these spaces I work to promote open science, reproducible research software and technology inclusion in Latin America.

In the 2026 cohort I am participating as mentee with the guidance of Guadalupe Pascal. My project is an R package to systematize the creation of Software and Data Management Plans through standardized templates developed with Quarto, which facilitate the documentation, preservation, and reuse of data and scientific code under international open science standards.

I applied to the Champions Program because I see it as a bridge: between where I am technically and where I want to be. I hope to learn about the rOpenSci peer review process, deepen my understanding of testing, technical documentation, and everything that makes a package really useful to others. I’m also looking to connect with a network of developers and researchers who share open science values. Finally, I want research software developed from the Global South to have greater visibility and for our contributions to be recognized, and I think rOpenSci is the ideal platform for that.

Estefania Torrejón

I am Peruvian and a biologist graduate from the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos (UNMSM), with a Master’s degree in Biomedical Sciences from the Institute of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (IHMT) in Lisbon, Portugal. I currently reside in Portugal, where I work as a predoctoral researcher in bioinformatics at the Metabolic Diseases Research Lab of NOVA Medical School. I am also director of the International Relations Department of the Peruvian Society of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology.

The project I am developing in the framework of the rOpenSci Champions Program consists of the preparation and submission of my R package, EV-Net, to the CRAN repository. EV-Net is a bioinformatics tool that identifies and prioritizes molecules present in the cargo of extracellular vesicles (EVs) with high regulatory potential on a receptor tissue of interest. EVs are structures surrounded by a lipid bilayer that carry a great diversity of active molecules. These vesicles can move through the organism and reach specific tissues, which is why they are recognized as key mediators of cell-to-cell communication (CCC). However, most of the bioinformatics tools available to study CCC do not consider EV-mediated communication. To address this limitation, my collaborators, supervisors, and I developed EV-Net.

Being an rOpenSci Champion is an invaluable opportunity to receive the necessary training, coaching and mentoring to bring EV-Net up to the required quality standards and to be successfully incorporated into CRAN.

Next steps

With the presentation of this new group of Champeons, we begin the fourth edition of the program, the second in Spanish. This group has already started the training stage and met their mentors. They will be working for 12 months developing new packages, preparing existing packages to submit to the peer review process, and reviewing other people’s packages.

If you want to follow the development of their projects and where and when their dissemination and communication activities will take place, don’t miss our blog articles, news in our newsletter and social networks.