iSchool Lecturer Elizabeth Wickes (MS '16) has been elected to the 2018 Executive Council for the Carpentries, the first joint steering committee for the merged organizations of Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry. The Carpentries is a volunteer community of instructors, more than one thousand worldwide, teaching scientists basic lab skills for research computing.
Since completing her instructor certification in 2015, Wickes has served as an instructor for local workshops and was the lead instructor at several digital humanities workshops that utilized Carpentries materials. In addition, she has adapted several of the core Software Carpentry lessons for use in her own classes.
"The local Carpentries community at the University of Illinois has grown over the previous two years," said Wickes, "allowing my role to shift from instructing two to three times a semester to being a mentor to new instructors and focusing my instruction efforts on instruction training events, both remote and local. As a board member, my goals are to represent non-STEM domains, work with the assessment group to understand what we are doing well and where we are needed most, and help the joint mission of Software and Data Carpentry find its voice as a merged group."
Wickes joined the iSchool in June 2017. Her experience includes work as a data curation specialist for the University of Illinois Library and as a project coordinator, data curator, and curation manager with WolframAlpha in Champaign. Since 2013, she has served as co-organizer of the Champaign-Urbana Python User Group.