Lecturer Elizabeth Wickes (MS '16) has received a NumFocus Contributor Award for her contributions to Project Jupyter, a nonprofit, open-source project that supports interactive data science and scientific computing across all programming languages. Wickes was recognized for her community and educational work advocating the use of notebooks in teaching Python and Jupyter. According to the NumFocus news release, the University of Illinois, the Midwest Big Data Hub, The Carpentries, and the library science communities "benefit from her ‘teaching with notebooks' talks and open source teaching materials."
"I'm really excited to have been part of the Jupyter Community and to watch it grow further into being a tool for every classroom," said Wickes. "Receiving this award is also a nice reminder that contributions to open source communities can come from a variety of angles, and the Jupyter Project has made a space for so many of us to contribute."
Wickes teaches programming and information technology courses at the iSchool. She was previously a data curation specialist for the Research Data Service at the University Library at Illinois and the curation manager for Wolfram|Alpha. She currently co-organizes the Champaign-Urbana Python user group and is a Software Carpentry instructor.
She is a member of 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.